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In our first Ladies Day for this year, Jennifer Rubin has a few romps. The first is a post on the “second-term-curse.”
We know many recent presidents fell prey to a second-term curse. Richard Nixon was forced out of office by Watergate. Bill Clinton was impeached. George W. Bush had Hurricane Katrina and then the financial meltdown.
We are barely out of January and all this has occurred: We learned the economy contracted in the 4th quarter of 2012. President Obama is trying to wriggle out of a sequester, which he insisted upon in the 2011 budget negotiations. The Congressional Budget Office says our debt is dangerously increasing. Obama was forced to push Susan Rice aside and should have pushed Chuck Hagel off the boat. Jack Lew is now under scrutiny for ignoring federal law regarding Medicare insolvency warnings. And Benghazi — you remember the story the mainstream media would not cover? — has turned into a debacle. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified today that the president was absent during the Benghazi, Libya, attack(s) and neither he nor Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke to anyone in the White House after briefly telling the president an attack was underway. What?!?
The last item is stunning, in part, because no reporter or debate moderator asked the very simple question many conservative critics were asking (Where was the president?) and because no senior official came forward before the election to say, “Ya know the president wasn’t around.” It is almost like the press and the administration together helped conceal gross irresponsibility by the president until after the election. …
Then Jennifer indulges in schadenfreude covering troubles for Menendez, obama, and Hagel.
… And then we come to Chuck Hagel, the Republican who’s supposed to show how bipartisan the president is and give him cover on huge Pentagon cuts. The dependable soldier was AWOL at the hearing, and instead a clueless bumbler showed up, which did create a tiny bit of bipartisan agreement in the form of amazement that the president wanted such a person around, let alone in charge of our military.
Hagel’s confirmation is now hung up, and virtually all Republicans oppose him. On the karma caravan, in the 2012 election Hagel promised now-freshman Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) that he would support her; he then changed his mind and backed loser Bob Kerrey. Today Fischer writes in an op-ed in the Omaha World Herald: “I appreciate Chuck Hagel’s service, both as an infantryman in Vietnam and as a United States senator representing Nebraska. However, after meeting with him privately and witnessing his confusing and contradictory testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, I cannot support his nomination.”
So Christie may have the pleasure of replacing Menendez. Bush and Cheney get the last laugh on the war on terror. And Hagel and the faux bipartisan president are getting their heads handed to them. Isn’t politics grand?
And Rubin suggests this weekend is critical for the Hagel nomination.
… Certainly, the stalling on documents is angering Republican senators. On Thursday, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tweeted his decision: “After disappointing hearing, unanswered questions, failure to comply with transparency requirements I cannot support Hagel.” If Hagel doesn’t pick up more support than the two already committed Republicans, there will be 43 potential “no” votes from Republican senators. And if Hagel continues to snub the committee (one can imagine him coming back with only a fraction of the requested documents), there would be a real risk of filibuster.
The White House insists that everything is on track. But really? Aside from the fact that the same team promised that Hagel would satisfy all concerns and wow everyone in the hearing, the White House isn’t acting like it has a handle on the process. Hagel and his handlers were clearly surprised by the intensity of the hearing questions, and now they are surprised again that the Republicans are pushing for data on Hagel’s foreign connections.
It does seem the weekend is critical. We will see how vigorously (or not) the White House defends Hagel on the Sunday shows; whether any more Republicans publicly announce their opposition or any Democrats show weakness; and, finally, what documents, if any, Hagel coughs up. The weekend also gives the White House, if so inclined, to come up with a Plan B — a qualified, competent nominee who won’t scare the living daylights out of the Senate.
Finally, Ms. Rubin thinks Syrian inaction is catching up to the administration.
… So yes, Obama is a left-wing ideologue domestically and internationally. Sometimes he gets his way. He’s so far to the left and so enamored of retrenchment that he was alone in rejecting more robust action in Syria. Former deputy national security director Elliott Abrams observes:
So, every senior member of the national security agencies–the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the CIA Director, and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff–favored action. And the president rejected this unanimous recommendation.
That is his prerogative, of course. One cannot escape the conclusion that electoral politics played a role, as The New York Times’s phrasing suggests. That should be remembered, as should the fact of this unanimous recommendation, when next we hear White House explanations of why the United States cannot and should not act. “It’s too risky; we don’t know who to whom to give the training or arms; it might backfire; they don’t need the arms;” the excuses go on and on. But rather a different light is thrown on those excuses when we learn that if the president believed them, none of his top advisers did.
So losing an election, dear conservatives, is not good, especially when it comes to international affairs.
But it’s not the end of America or the end of center-right politics or even the end of conservative reform, especially when there is a GOP House majority and a Senate with no filibuster-proof majority and plenty of skittish red-state Democrats. …
Regarding the president’s lack of courage in Syria. Danielle Pletka says;
… Now, none of this will happen. 80,000+ people are dead. Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups have established a beachhead in Syria. The protracted war and the aftermath are likely to destabilize a NATO ally (Turkey), an Arab leader (Jordan’s Abdullah), Lebanon, Iraq, and the Israeli-Syrian border. The future of Syria post-Assad is in question. And who owns this epic disaster? Barack Obama. Perhaps he should have listened to wiser counsel. Instead, he has searched for less independent thinkers to fill the ranks of his national security team. To paraphrase from the Good Book, it is clear that an unwise man will ignore and refuse learning, and a man without understanding will attain foolish counsel. Indeed.
Debra Saunders highlights the hypocrisy of the drone killings
NBC released a confidential Department of Justice paper Tuesday concluding that our government can authorize the use of drones to kill targeted terrorist leaders, including U.S. citizens abroad. This story bares the dividing line between honest liberals like Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the ACLU and The Chronicle‘s editorial board, all of whom opposed some of the harsher antiterrorism tactics employed both under President George W. Bush and this administration, and rank opportunists like Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who denounced what they described as civil-liberties violations under Bush but ditched said scruples when they took power.
As a candidate, Obama opposed the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which he called torture, and described GuantanamoBay as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. In 2009, his attorney general, Eric Holder, reopened criminal investigations of CIA interrogators who had been investigated previously but, for good reason, were not charged.
Yet in the white paper, Holder’s Justice Department signed off on Obama or “an informed high-level official” ordering the death of Americans who pose an “imminent threat” abroad. The paper also loosened the definition of “imminent threat.” …
Peggy Noonan loved one media item from the last week. That was the Paul Harvey commercial for Dodge Ram Trucks that appeared during the Super Bowl. She gagged on another;
… Which gets us to another story involving a media figure and a media institution. I refer to Steve Kroft’s interview, on “60 Minutes,” with Barack Obama and departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That made a big impression too. It didn’t remind us of a style or approach for which we feel nostalgia, but one about which we are feeling increased apprehension, and that is the mainstream media fawn-a-thon toward the current president.
The Kroft interview was a truly scandalous example of the genre. It was so soft, so dazzled, so supportive, so embarrassing. And it was that way from the beginning, when Mr. Kroft breathlessly noted, “The White House granted us 30 minutes.” Granted. Like kings.
What followed was a steady, targeted barrage of softballs. ..
… The entire interview reminded me of an old radio insult: When an interviewer didn’t try to push and probe, didn’t even try to get the story, the resulting interview was called “soft as a sneaker full of puppy excrement.” No, they didn’t say excrement.
We are living in the age of emergency—the economy, the Mideast, North Korea, Iran. The president has an utter and historic inability to forge a relationship with Congress. Unemployment seems intractable.
And the best Steve Kroft and “60 Minutes” could do was how wonderful are you?
The Obama-Clinton relationship is interesting, but here are some questions about it that might have elicited more than outtakes for a Hillary 2016 commercial: …