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Jennifer Rubin says Hagel shows contempt for the senate.
Chuck Hagel and his White House handlers have apparently decided that the best tactic for their bloodied nominee is to stonewall the Senate. We’ve seen that his approval rating is going down over time. Every speech that turns up adds fuel to the fire of his opponents and reveals a man with animosity toward our most reliable ally in the Middle East.
That means that he refuses to supply information on a long list of investments, will not make accessible his speeches in the last five years (e.g. a 2011 speech at Cameron University) and is denying information about the groups and foreign countries supporting him and/or his organizations (e.g. Atlantic Council). As of this writing he hasn’t even responded to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s inquiry as to whether he accused Israel of approaching “apartheid” and called Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu a “radical.”
An aide to a GOP senator tells me, “Hagel told Senator Levin during his nomination hearing that ‘Everything that is out there that we can find we’ll make every effort to get it and provide it.’” That didn’t happen, however. “Hagel’s flip-flop from his pledge to Senator Levin and stonewalling by his White House handlers reflects a not so thinly veiled contempt for the Senate’s advice and consent responsibilities,” the aide says.
Today, for the first time in the Hagel proceedings, the liberal B’nai Brith put out a statement, nearly encouraging the Senate to delay the vote: …
Dan Senor in The Weekly Standard notes the risks of having a defense secretary with the same amount of experience as the president.
In September 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin received a request from the U.S. commander in Somalia for extra tanks, armored vehicles, and AC-130 Spectre gunships to support U.S. operations in Mogadishu. Aspin refused the request. The White House was not involved in the decision. Days later, 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, some 84 were wounded, two U.S. choppers were shot down, and one pilot was captured. Aspin, who later conceded he had erred in denying the commander’s request, appeared weak when responding to detailed questions during a congressional hearing. His resignation followed less than a year into his hapless tour running the Pentagon.
Myriad concerns have been raised about Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary, including his voting record, impolitic statements, two unremarkable Senate terms, scant management experience, and embarrassing performance at his confirmation hearing last month. Yet Hagel’s defenders dismiss these concerns because, they argue, the important decisions are made at the White House, by the president and his team.
“After all,” said Senate Armed Services Committee member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), “the president is the one who sets policy.” White House press secretary Jay Carney is similarly sanguine that Hagel “will implement all of the president’s policies with regard to the Defense Department.” Indeed, at last month’s committee hearing Hagel himself said, “I won’t be in a policy-making position.” Fear not, Hagel’s defenders say, Secretary Hagel won’t be given keys to the car.
This view wildly understates the role of America’s most important cabinet officer. Much of a defense secretary’s work is at his own discretion. He is responsible for military budgets and procurement, personnel promotions, public diplomacy, the Pentagon’s relations with defense ministries and militaries around the world, tactical military movements, and most force deployments. When a commander asks for an additional unit or capability—as with Les Aspin in Somalia, with Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even with Leon Panetta in Benghazi—the request lands on the secretary’s desk. And more often than not, it is the secretary, not the president, who makes the call. …
Peter Kirsanow on the prospects of putting in SecDef office a figurative Caligula’s horse.
Chuck Hagel easily proved himself unfit to be secretary of defense during his nomination hearing. Not only was he ignorant of fundamental aspects of the job, but his positions on some of the critical defense issues of the day are preposterous if not dangerous. No one disputes that his performance at the hearing was the worst and most embarrassing of any nominee for any prominent position in memory.
Yet by all reports he will be our next secretary of defense.
Why?
The explanation heard most frequently from senators and pundits alike is a robotic “the president is entitled to his nominee unless there’s some special circumstance.” If this isn’t such a circumstance, what is? How unqualified for a position must someone be before the confirmation process is no longer a rubber stamp?
This nomination, to a position that’s not exactly inconsequential, is an insult. Confirmation of a man so demonstrably unfit for this office is an insult.
This is what the political class thinks of us, that we will accept mediocrity as our due and not complain or even question.
The president should be asked why he couldn’t find anyone better. Senators should be asked whether the traditions of the Senate are more important than the nation’s defense. Unfortunately, they won’t be asked and, if asked, they won’t answer. They’ve got to move on to the latest “crisis” they’ve manufactured. And the press corps is too busy keeping score to tackle substance.
Just because they’re laughing in Tehran, Pyongyang, Moscow, and some hovel in Mali doesn’t mean this nomination is funny.
David Ignatius says the new cabinet will be the president’s.
… Obama has some big problems coming at him in foreign policy, starting with Syria and Iran. Both will require a delicate mix of pressure and diplomacy. To get the balance right, Obama will need a creative policy debate where advisers “think outside the box,” to use the management cliche.
Presidents always say that they want that kind of open debate, and Obama handles it better than most. But by assembling a team where all the top players are going in the same direction, he is perilously close to groupthink.
As bad as Hagel is, he still can’t top Joe Biden according to Seth Mandel.
… Ed Morrissey points out that Biden’s recent exhortation to Americans to buy and fire into the air a double-barrel shotgun for defense was pretty terrible legal advice, as well as counterproductive from a safety standpoint:
Anyone who has gone through a firearms safety course knows this basic rule: Never fire a “warning shot” into the air — especially when it means you have to reload immediately, as you would with two blasts from a double-barreled shotgun; you’ve just effectively disarmed yourself.
But more to the point, it ignores the physics of the ammunition. What goes up must come down, and when it does, it can kill — and often does….
Morrissey goes on to quote today’s U.S. News and World Report story explaining that “this specific behavior has been the cause of many negligent homicides over the years,” according to a gun-rights activist. It would land the unfortunate soul who took the vice president’s exceedingly unsafe and ill-conceived advice in big legal trouble: “aggravated menacing, a felony, and reckless endangering in the first degree,” according to the story.
Morrissey closes with a fair question:
If Biden doesn’t have the common sense to understand any of the above, let alone all of the above, why should anyone trust his efforts to rewrite gun laws that limit our legal rights to self-defense?
The good news on that front is that Biden would “write” gun legislation about as much as Obama “wrote” health care reform legislation. That is to say, he wouldn’t write a word of it, and probably wouldn’t actually know what’s in it without a neat, one-page talking point summary provided by the same people who have to periodically go before the public and remind people how thoroughly dangerous–and at times, illegal–it is to follow the advice of their vice president.