“From A Failed And Flawed Man”: Dick Cheney’s “Second-Rate” Personnel Assessments
It struck me as amusing last week when former Vice President Dick Cheney, complaining about proposed measures to reduce gun violence, complained there “isn’t adequate regard for the rights of law-abiding citizens.” Given Cheney’s track record while in office, it seemed like an odd thing to say.
But these remarks from the weekend were even more striking.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Saturday night that President Barack Obama has jeopardized U.S. national security by nominating substandard candidates for key cabinet posts and by degrading the U.S. military.
“The performance now of Barack Obama as he staffs up the national security team for the second term is dismal,” Cheney said in comments to about 300 members of the Wyoming Republican Party.
Cheney, a Wyoming native, said it was vital to the nation’s national security that “good folks” hold the positions of secretary of state, CIA director and secretary of defense. “Frankly, what he has appointed are second-rate people,” he said.
There is a certain oddity that underpins Cheney’s whining. For many political observers, the fact that so many national security policies from the Bush/Cheney era are still in place is cause for alarm, though Cheney himself seems eager to suggest this administration has departed radically from his predecessor.
But really, that’s just scratching the surface of what’s wrong with Cheney’s odd perspective.
Whether you agree with their positions or not, there’s nothing even remotely “second rate” about John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and John Brennan. These are experienced, capable individuals, with considerable expertise in their areas. Indeed, Kerry has a broad diplomatic background and was very nearly the president; Hagel is a decorated veteran and sage voice on the use of force (Cheney never got around to serving in the military before becoming the Pentagon chief); and Brennan actually served in the Bush/Cheney administration.
If the former V.P. has specific complaints about these nominees, I’d love to hear them.
But the real kicker here is Cheney’s confidence in his ability to make personnel assessments. Obama’s team, in Cheney’s mind, is “second rate,” but his team — filled with notorious names like Rumsfeld, Addington, and Libby — which oversaw some of the most spectacular failures in recent memory, was top tier?
Seriously?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 11, 2013
“Crossing The Line”: Senate GOP Ponders Hagel Strategy
Former Sen. Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to become the Secretary of Defense, struggled during his confirmation hearing last week, but that’s hardly derailed his chances. Thus far, Hagel has not yet lost the support of any Senate Democrats, and over the weekend, he picked up the backing of a second Senate Republican, Nebraska’s Mike Johanns.
With this in mind, when Hagel’s nomination is brought to the floor for an up-or-down vote, there’s no real doubt that a majority of the Senate will vote to confirmation him. The question for Republicans, then, is whether to allow the up-or-down vote to happen.
Since Hagel appears to enjoy the support of most, if not all, Democrats, Republicans would have to filibuster his nomination — something that has never been done to a Cabinet nominee since the advent of the 60-vote threshold nearly four decades ago, according to Senate records.
Several Cabinet nominees have failed to win the backing of a majority of senators — and others have withdrawn their names before reaching the Senate floor — but a filibuster would mark a serious breach in the unwritten protocol that governs the Senate.
I’ve been digging around for two weeks, trying to find an example of a cabinet secretary facing a filibuster, and my research is in line with Roll Call‘s findings — it just hasn’t happened. Not only has no nominee ever been defeated by a filibuster, no nominee (since the cloture threshold was moved to 60 votes) has ever even faced a filibuster.
The closest example I could find was Ronald Reagan’s nomination of C. William Verity to serve as the Secretary of Commerce in 1987. At the time, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) threatened to filibuster Reagan’s choice because Verity supported increased trade with the USSR. (Helms argued Verity supported “selling the Soviets the rope with which to hang the free world.”) But Helms eventually pulled back, dropped his threats, and the nominee was approved on an 84-11 vote.
In 2006, there was also a cloture vote on Dirk Kempthorne’s Interior nomination, but only eight Senate Democrats registered their opposition, there was no filibuster or attempt to block an up-or-down vote, and Kempthorne was confirmed with a voice vote.
So, in 2013, Republicans have to decide whether they’re prepared to break new ground.
From the Roll Call report:
No Republicans have said yet that they will demand Hagel clear that 60-vote hurdle, but the possibility has been bubbling below the surface in the Senate in recent days.
An aide to Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, who has been among the most vocal opponents of Hagel’s nomination, said Feb. 1 that “all options are on the table.” […]
Top aides insist there is no discord among leaders, but statements made in the wake of Hagel’s highly scrutinized appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee indicate there could be a difference in opinion. The consensus among leadership aides, however, is that if a filibuster is to happen, it likely would be staged by a junior member.
There is no formal head count on whether a filibuster would block Hagel or whether it would fail, but it would cross a line in the sand when it comes to Senate norms. And if you’re thinking it might reinvigorate the debate over reforming the institution’s filibuster rules, you’re not the only one.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 4, 2013
“A Congenital Hothead, A Man Of Grudges”: The Bitter Twilight Of John McCain Gives Even Republicans Pause
That one,” John McCain famously snarled in a presidential debate four years ago, referring to his opponent who was a quarter of a century younger and who had been in the Senate 3 years to McCain’s 20. It’s difficult to imagine a better revelation of the McCain psyche than that moment, but if there is one, then it came yesterday at the meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee, convened to consider the nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. The McCain fury is something to behold, almost irresistible for how unvarnished it is in all its forms. In the instance of the 2008 debate, McCain’s dumbfounded antipathy had to do with facing an opponent he so clearly considered unworthy. In the instance of the hearing yesterday, McCain’s bitter blast was at somebody who once was among his closest friends, a former Vietnam warrior and fellow Republican of a similarly independent ilk, who supported McCain’s first run for the presidency in 2000 against George W. Bush but then appeared to abandon the Arizona senator eight years later.
If all this suggests political differences born largely of personal dynamics and their breach, it’s because for McCain the two are interchangeable. At this moment we should make the effort to remind ourselves of what’s commendable about McCain, an admiral’s son who could only live up to his father’s reputation by way of five years in a Hanoi jail, where he walked—or hobbled, given the crippling abuse he suffered at the hands of his captors—the walk of loyalty and didn’t just talk it. When offered freedom halfway through those five years, he refused to leave behind his fellow prisoners of war who had been there longer and were due their freedom first. It’s a story so formidable that 12 years ago Bush supporters resorted to suggesting McCain was a “Hanoi Candidate,” brainwashed in the manner of cinematic Manchurians. So let’s not question McCain’s courage, or a code that means as much to him as patriotism. In that initial presidential run, admiration for the man trumped what disagreements overly romantic voters like myself had when it came time to mark his name on our ballots (as I did in that year’s California primary).
In the time since, two things have happened to McCain. One was the Iraq War, the worst American foreign policy blunder of the post-World War II era, which McCain wholeheartedly supported from the beginning and about which he’s never intimated a second thought. The other was Barack Obama, electoral politics’ upstart lieutenant whose bid to become five-star general, bypassing stops along the way at captain, major and colonel, wasn’t just temerity to a man who waited his turn to be released from prison, but insubordination. Those two things converged yesterday in McCain’s prosecution of Hagel, no less sorry a spectacle on McCain’s part for the fact that Hagel handled it so unimpressively. Perhaps Hagel was startled, figuring his one-time compatriot would be tough but not vicious. If that’s the case, then he never knew McCain as well as he thought or hoped, because if he did then he would know that McCain is a man of grudges. In his memoir Faith of My Fathers, in which words like “gallantry” appear without embarrassment (and which no one has more earned the right to use), McCain himself acknowledges being the congenital hothead of legend who’s nearly come to blows with colleges. Half a century later, he recalls every altercation with every Naval Academy classmate; as a child, rage sometimes drove him to hold his breath until he blacked out. No need to indulge in untrained psychotherapy from afar to surmise that the ability to nurse such a grudge may be what gets you through half a decade of cruel incarceration.
At any rate, what happened yesterday wasn’t about Hagel at all. It wasn’t even about the Iraq War’s 2007 “surge,” which McCain is desperate to justify because he can never justify the war itself that finds Hagel moved to the right side of history while McCain remains stubbornly on the wrong. It’s about that junior senator from Illinois who crossed McCain early in some obscure backroom Senate deal no one can remember anymore, then denied McCain the presidency in no small part because Obama understood the folly of Iraq better than McCain can allow himself to. McCain’s personal honor in Hanoi was too hard won to be stained now by almost anything he does, including how he’s allowed temperament, pique and ego to steamroll the judgment and perspective that we hope all of our elected officers have, let alone presidents. But his political honor, not to mention whatever might once have recommended him to the presidency, has fallen victim to the way that Obama has gotten fatally under his skin. Even if this once-noble statesman should succeed in denying Hagel’s nomination as he denied Susan Rice’s prospects for Secretary of State (and even the most devout Hagel supporter would have to acknowledge that the Defense nominee’s performance before the Committee was often a shambles), McCain’s unrelenting obsession with the grievance that Obama has come to represent to him is the saddest legacy in memory. The very fact of Obama and all things Obamic has turned McCain into something toxic, maybe even to himself.
By: Steve Erickson, The American Prospect, February 2, 2013
“Foolish And Bellicose”: The Failure Of The Anti-Hagel Campaign
Former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense was really never much in doubt, despite the clamorous complaints of a few vocal conservatives. Still, Hagel’s likely confirmation has gained additional support in recent weeks that make his success all but certain. Despite the concerted efforts of a few outside Republican interest groups and a steady stream of hostile coverage from conservative media outlets, Hagel has received the public support of numerous former national security officials, diplomats, and retired military officers, as well as securing endorsements from several senators even before his hearing began today. Excluding members of the Bush administration, Hagel’s nomination has been endorsed by every living former secretary of defense and secretary of state. Faced with an unprecedented campaign of character assassination and misrepresentation in the media, Hagel has become a rallying point for Americans across the political spectrum interested in greater prudence and restraint in the way the U.S. acts overseas.
While it shouldn’t make a difference to the final outcome, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s threat to put a hold on Hagel’s nomination until outgoing Secretary Leon Panetta testifies on the Benghazi attack is a reminder that issues that are mostly irrelevant to Hagel’s competence to run the Defense Department have dominated the debate over this appointment. Hawkish Republicans have argued that then-Sen. Hagel’s relatively mild dissent on issues related to Israel and Iran disqualify him for the job. However, most of these have no bearing on the responsibilities Hagel will have at the Pentagon, and those that do should increase the public’s confidence in Hagel rather than undermine it. This has underscored the overwhelmingly ideological nature of the campaign against him, which has had more to do with policing what current and future politicians can say on foreign policy than it does with selecting the right people to serve in the Cabinet.
So it appears that the anti-Hagel campaign has failed. The Democratic defections that conservatives coveted never materialized, and this week, the first Republican, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, announced his support for the nomination. The anti-Hagel campaign has mainly managed to waste its donors’ money, and it has made the politicians that have sided with it appear foolish and bellicose, and all for the sake of “taking a stand” against a nominee who, lest we forget, is a Republican.
Still, at least 15 Senate Republicans have declared their opposition to Hagel or are reported to be leaning in that direction, which reflects just how committed a large number of the party’s leaders still are to a hard-line foreign policy vision that has brought the GOP and the country nothing but woe for the last decade. The failure of the anti-Hagel effort could be a final straw that breaks the hold that the worst hard-liners have had on the party, but so far, there is not much evidence of that. In the meantime, the message that most people will receive is that leading Republicans have learned nothing from their past failures and seek retribution against those in their party that have.
After all, Hagel was one of the few national Republican figures who saw the potential pitfalls in Iraq before the invasion, and later came to recognize the full extent of the folly of the U.S. war there. Most of his Republican colleagues in Washington have still not fully reckoned with the disastrous decision to invade in 2003, and to make matters worse, they insist on holding Hagel’s skepticism about the wisdom of attacking Iran against him. Each charge they make against Hagel for being too “soft” on Iran bounces back on them and marks them as the reflexively, dangerously aggressive people that they are.
The good news for the country is that a competent and qualified nominee for the Defense post will almost certainly be approved by the Senate in the near future. Unfortunately, a large number of Hagel’s fellow Republicans have done their best to use this confirmation process to inflict even more damage on their party’s battered reputation on foreign policy and national security. Hagel’s nomination should have been a chance for Republicans to start repairing the party’s image in the eyes of the public. They are well on their way to squandering it.
ByDaniel Larison, The Week, January 31, 2013
“My Country, Always Right, Never Wrong”: The Regressive, Vacuous Ideology Of Neocons
In the three months since the GOP’s trouncing in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican Party has shown numerous signs that it’s willing to change course to improve its future fortunes. First, the House GOP crumpled in the fiscal cliff standoff. Then it refused to engage in yet another game of chicken over the debt ceiling. And now Republicans in both houses of Congress appear ready to pursue a bipartisan deal on immigration. Those who care about the future of the party should applaud these developments. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be sufficient to solve the GOP’s problems. On the contrary, Republicans will continue to find themselves at an electoral disadvantage until they break free from the grip of neoconservatism.
Since the term neocon is so often deployed for polemical purposes these days, let’s be very precise about what it means. Back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the original neoconservatives — Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and their colleagues at The Public Interest and Commentary — had two main aims: In domestic affairs, to expose the defects of Great Society social programs and propose more effective (read: less ambitious) alternatives; and in foreign affairs, to counter McGovernite isolationism with hawkish realism, which meant adopting a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.
The domestic side of neoconservatism reached its apex of influence in the 1990s, with New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s crime-fighting policies and, at the federal level, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. Today, domestic neoconservatism is largely extinct, a victim of its own success at changing the public policy conversation.
As for the neocons’ foreign policy agenda, it, too, became irrelevant once the Soviet Union collapsed and the Democrats showed (under Bill Clinton) that they were no longer averse to using military force.
Yet some of the neocons — or rather, some of their children — were unwilling to accept their fate. By the mid-1990s, Irving Kristol’s son William had teamed up with Norman Podhoretz’s son John to found The Weekly Standard, a magazine that would reorient neoconservatism entirely toward foreign policy — and toward a very different and far more reckless style of foreign policy thinking than the one their parents championed.
Neoconservatism 2.0 is the apotheosis of hawkishness. A latter-day neocon isn’t just convinced that force is often necessary in specific cases, which is what hawks have always maintained. Rather, he’s convinced that force is invariably good any time and any place it is used by the United States. As Kristol put it in a seminal 1996 essay co-authored with Robert Kagan, a foreign policy in which the United States started and fought wars around the globe would be, axiomatically, “good for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world.”
“My country — always right, never wrong”: It’s the least thoughtful and most primitive form of patriotism. And yet, since September 11, 2001, the Republican Party has adopted and repeatedly reaffirmed the outlook as its guiding ideology in foreign affairs. Why? First, because it perfectly fit the angry, wounded mood of the country (and within the Bush administration) after 9/11. Second, because it perfectly fit the angry, wounded mood of the GOP base after the White House was captured by a man many Republicans consider an anti-American Kenyan socialist.
Fortunately, the country as a whole seems to have moved beyond its post-9/11 collective PTSD, aided by the passage of time as well as by the sobering experience of having to clean up the mess that followed the neocon-inspired invasion of Iraq in 2003. It’s a very good sign for the nation — and for Democrats — that the American people prefer President Obama’s more measured style of conducting foreign policy to the one-size-fits-all bellicosity favored by the neocon-infatuated GOP.
Obama has managed to lead the U.S. through a period of considerable global volatility with only minor missteps — and he’s been able to do so because his approach to foreign policymaking is shaped by a clear-eyed assessment of the emerging post-Cold War world order. For a time, the implosion of the Soviet Union left what appeared to be a “unipolar” world ruled by the one remaining superpower. But unipolarity was always an illusion — and it’s revealed to be less and less accurate with each passing year.
Yes, American power is formidable in many areas. But there’s an awful lot we cannot do — and at the top of the list is bending whole peoples and regions of the world to our will. In the multi-polar world we now inhabit, the U.S. will remain the single most powerful nation, but not by orders of magnitude. We will defend the nation’s borders and its interests. We will offer support to allies in those selective cases (NATO in Libya, France in Mali) when we judge that doing so really will be “good for America and good for the world.” But we will not be leading any crusades to transform (and liberalize) entire civilizations at the barrel of a gun. Why? Because the effort would fail — and failure is bad for America and bad for the world.
The president deserves our support in his attempt to adjust American expectations to fit the reality of a complicated, recalcitrant world — just as the GOP deserves our disdain for denying that same reality. Which is precisely what leading Republicans are doing in their efforts to block Obama’s choice to head the department of defense. What is it about Chuck Hagel that so rankles the right? Some cry anti-Semitism, but the charge is so groundless that Hagel’s critics have yet to produce a single shred of evidence to substantiate it. What is it, then, that supposedly disqualifies him from serving as secretary of defense? The answer: Hagel is a Republican who dares to believe that the use of American military force is only sometimes (as opposed to always) a good thing. That’s all it takes to provoke denunciations in today’s GOP.
Until that changes, the Republican Party will continue to be punished — and to earn its punishment — at the ballot box.
By: Damon Linker, Senior Writing Fellow, The University of Pennsylvania,The Week, February 1, 2013
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