“Completely Unhinged”: John McCain Is Lost In A Fog Of Partisan Rage
Looking back at the tragic and deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last fall, we know quite a bit about what happened. We also know, thanks to an independent investigation, that “Republican charges of a cover-up” were “pure fiction.”
But as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) argued yesterday, he can’t be bothered with facts — he has a partisan vendetta to pursue.
For those who can’t watch clips online, “Meet the Press” host David Gregory pressed the Republican senator on the unsubstantiated charge that the Obama administration has engaged in a “massive cover-up.” Gregory asked a simple question: “A cover-up of what?”
McCain, just a few days after explaining how important it is not to be “disagreeable,” became unusually belligerent, asking the host whether he cares about the deaths of four Americans.
Gregory tried to get an answer anyway, responding, “You said there is a cover-up. A cover-up of what?” McCain, unable to think of anything substantive, said, “Of the information concerning the deaths of four brave Americans.”
Even for McCain, whose capacity has deteriorated sharply in recent years, this was a pathetic display.
Remember, McCain has had several months to think about this. He’s sat through classified and unclassified briefings. He’s participated in a series of congressional hearings. He’s (presumably) read the results of independent investigations, and had his own questions answered, verbally and in writing.
And yet after all of this, McCain is not only ignorant of the basics, he doesn’t understand his own conspiracy theory. The senator, after pondering the issue since September, still believes there’s an elaborate “cover-up,” but doesn’t know why he thinks this.
The exchange on “Meet the Press” wasn’t awkward; it wasn’t bizarre; it was alarming.
This was the point at which it might have dawned on everyone watching, including journalists who still consider the senator credible on foreign policy and national security, “Good lord, John McCain has no idea what he’s talking about.”
I hate to be a stickler for such things, but as a rule, when the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee accuses the White House on national television of orchestrating a cover-up as part of a terrorist attack, it’s not too much to ask that the senator have some idea what he’s talking about.
But in this case, McCain is simply lost in a fog of his own partisan rage. At this point, the man doesn’t understand what he doesn’t understand, and worse, he just doesn’t care. McCain no longer thinks it matters that he can’t back up his accusations; he simply wants to keep making them. And if you press him for details he should understand, the increasingly unhinged senator will suggest you’re indifferent to the deaths of Americans at terrorists’ hands.
Why? Because he’s John McCain.
Incidentally, this was McCain’s fourth Sunday show appearance of the new year — that’s four appearances in seven weeks — which suggests he’ll have another opportunity to answer similar questions in a national setting very soon.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 18, 2013
“Old Grudges”: Why Senate Republicans Confirmed John Kerry But Stalled Chuck Hagel
The Senate Republican vendetta against Chuck Hagel – acted out in the filibuster that has derailed his nomination as Secretary of Defense – seems extraordinarily petty — if John McCain (R-AZ) is telling the truth. The Arizona senator publicly acknowledged that his party’s rejection of Hagel, a fellow Republican and decorated Vietnam veteran, was motivated by old grudges dating from the Bush administration.
“There’s a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and said he was the worst president since Herbert Hoover and said the ‘surge’ was the worst blunder since the Vietnam war, which was nonsense,” McCain told Fox News after the vote on Thursday. “He was anti-his own party, and people…don’t forget that. You can disagree but if you’re disagreeable, people don’t forget that.”
So bent on vengeance were the Republicans that they even tolerated the McCarthyite diversions of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), a freshman whose resemblance to the late Wisconsin demagogue emerged in his repeated insinuations that Hagel had secretly accepted money from North Korea and Saudi Arabia. This seemed to disturb McCain, but he admonished Cruz in the mildest terms possible, and without naming him.
When the Cruz smears fell flat, it became plain that the assault on Hagel’s nomination wasn’t based on any concern that rose to the level of Constitutional principle, national defense, or substantive foreign policy. Among the Republican senators who promoted the filibuster against Hagel were several, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John Cornyn (R-TX) who had insisted when George W. Bush was president that every single one of his nominees deserved an “up or down vote” – and thus should not be subject, as a matter of presidential authority in Article II of the Constitution, to tactical delay.
But then all the rules are different, now that Barack Obama is (and remains) president.
Worse than their inconsistency over the filibuster — which at least is a bipartisan hypocrisy shared by Democrats — the Republicans have claimed that Hagel’s policy views are so far from the mainstream that he cannot be confirmed.
But the same senators almost unanimously confirmed the nomination of former senator John Kerry (D-MA) as Secretary of State, virtually without questioning any of his positions. Kerry, a superb and highly qualified choice, won that easy approval despite holding positions practically identical to those of Hagel concerning Mideast policy, Israel, Iran, North Korea, nuclear disarmament, and many other critical and controversial issues.
In fact, Kerry has ventured even further than Hagel on certain specific questions, such as the final status of Jerusalem in a potential peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, or the fate of Jewish settlements in occupied territory.
During his senatorial travels abroad over the years, Kerry became an outspoken advocate for international action against climate change – an activist stance that could hardly have endeared him to Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and the other mossback climate deniers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who so eagerly rubber-stamped his nomination. Yet Hagel, a climate-change skeptic during his senatorial career, was harangued and vilified for eight hours during his nomination hearing, and then denied a vote on the Senate floor.
The contrast between the swift confirmation of Kerry and the blockading of Hagel also pointed up the phoniness of Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). As a condition of permitting a vote on the Hagel nomination, Graham insisted that he must have additional information from the White House about the jihadi attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. But if that information is so essential, why didn’t Graham, McCain, and their fellow Republicans hold up the nomination of Kerry for the same reason? As everyone in Washington knows, the answer is an example of their partisan venality: They hoped that Kerry’s vacated seat might be filled in a special election by their former colleague from Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown.
By the time that the Senate adjourned, it was clear that Hagel was short of only a single vote to achieve cloture – and that the Senate Democrats, determined to win his confirmation, will eventually achieve their goal. They must, not only because Hagel is a qualified nominee selected by the Commander in Chief, but because the Senate cannot accord veto power over the president’s national security nominations to Republican extremists.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, February 15, 2013
On “Emboldening” Republicans: Ruining President Obama’s Day Is About All The Grand Strategy Republicans Have Right Now
Good decisions seldom come from worrying whether the other side thinks you’re weak.
I want to expand on something I brought up yesterday on the utility, for the opposition party, of doing nothing more with your efforts than becoming the biggest pain in the president’s ass you possibly can. As of now, Republicans have mounted an unprecedented filibuster against Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be Secretary of Defense, the latest in a long line of cases in which they looked at a prevailing norm of doing business in Washington and realized that there was no reason they couldn’t violate it. Sure, up until now we had an unspoken agreement that the president would get to appoint pretty much whoever he wants to his cabinet unless the nominee was a drunk, a criminal, or grossly unqualified. But Republicans feel perfectly free to cast that agreement aside. Why? Because screw you, Obama, that’s why. In any case, it looks at the moment as though this filibuster will be temporary, and Hagel will eventually get confirmed.
So now, there are two ways to look at this. Having caused all this trouble, will the Republicans feel like they got it out of their system and calm themselves down a bit? Or will they be emboldened to find new and creative ways to throw monkey wrenches into the gears of government?
As Michael Tomasky points out, the whole idea of appointing a Republican was to avoid this kind of mess:
The only utility to a Democratic president of having a Republican SecDef is that Republicans will cut the guy some slack and not pester him the way they might go after a Democrat. Hagel obviously will not fulfill that purpose, so I’m not sure what good Hagel is to Obama anyway. He’s more trouble than he’s worth. Hagel ought to think about withdrawing his name. I’d rather see a Democrat running the shop anyway. The only problem with Hagel withdrawing is that it escalates this craziness.
I agree with Tomasky in that I don’t particularly care on a substantive level whether Chuck Hagel becomes Secretary of Defense. From what I can tell he’ll be neither the best occupant of that position we’ve had nor the worst. I also think that the idea that he’ll fundamentally shape American foreign policy is overblown; Barack Obama seems to have a pretty clear idea of what he wants, and Hagel isn’t going to steamroll him into doing things he doesn’t want to do. It isn’t like he’ll be Don Rumsfeld, blundering about the world causing destruction while his president is too busy contemplating his place in history to notice. But would it really escalate the craziness if Hagel did withdraw?
I think there’s always reason to be skeptical of arguments that involve somebody getting “emboldened” to act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. You may recall that we heard this a lot from the Bush administration and its supporters during the long years of the Iraq War. We couldn’t even discuss getting out, they argued, because that would “embolden” the terrorists. But if you will recall, lack of boldness wasn’t al Qaeda’s problem. And no, I’m not saying congressional Republicans are like terrorists, but the principle is basically the same. It’s true that people’s future behavior can be shaped by whether they think they won or lost the last battle. But good decisions seldom come from worrying whether you look weak to the other side.
I’m sure that as far as many Republicans are concerned, they already won on the whole Hagel question, because their goal wasn’t to stop someone they genuinely believe has troubling views, or to move the Pentagon more in a direction they want; their goal was to ruin Barack Obama’s day. And if Hagel withdrew his nomination, it wouldn’t “embolden” them, because ruining Obama’s day is about all the grand strategy they have right now.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 15, 2013
“Shallow, Ignorant, And Totally Unserious”: Why Republicans Can No Longer Be Trusted on National Security
It’s been clear, at least since the 2012 election, that the Republican Party has abrogated its role—really, abandoned any interest—in shaping or seriously discussing American foreign policy. But only recently has this indifference shifted into toxic territory, and on Tuesday the fumes formed a poisonous cloud, the likes of which hadn’t been witnessed in decades.
The occasion was the Senate Armed Services Committee’s vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense. In the end, Hagel pulled through, but only on a party-line vote (all Democrats in favor, all Republicans opposed) and after a debate that raised doubts less about Hagel than about the modern GOP’s inclination—and the Senate’s ability—to oversee anything as consequential as national security.
Hagel’s Jan. 31 confirmation hearings had been appalling enough—not just for his own lackluster performance, but more for his inquisitors’ bizarrely narrow focus. They asked almost nothing about the issues that will face the next defense secretary: the budget, the roles and missions of the Army, the balance of drones vs. manned aircraft, the size of the Navy, the future of Afghanistan, or the “pivot” from Europe to Asia. Instead, they hectored the nominee about the adequacy of his fealty toward Israel, his animosity toward Iran, and whether he was right or wrong about the 2007 troop-surge in Iraq.
There was all that in the follow-up session on Feb. 12, plus a whiff of paranoia and sedition that’s rarely been cracked open since the days of Joseph McCarthy.
The stench started wafting through the air with the comments of Sen. David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, who trumpeted the warnings that in 2008 Hagel gave a speech to the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. Vitter called for halting the hearings until a video of the speech could be found, to see whether the nominee had voiced extremist or anti-Israeli comments.
Then came Sen. Ted Cruz, freshman Republican from Texas, who seemed to be explicitly angling for McCarthy’s inheritance. Cruz shuddered that Hagel had made $200,000 over a two-year period from Corsair Capital, which has contracts abroad, yet he could not tell the committee whether any of that money came from a foreign government. It would be “relevant to know,” Cruz intoned, “if that $200,000 … came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea. I have no evidence to suggest that it is or isn’t,” but there should be an investigation.
At that point, Sen. Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, lambasted Cruz for having “impugned the patriotism” of Hagel, for accusing him of getting “cozy” with terrorists.
Now Cruz is but a freshman; his idiocies can’t be ascribed to his party as a whole. But Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma is the Armed Services Committee’s top-ranking Republican, and he not only sided with Cruz but snapped back at Nelson’s admonitions. Hagel’s nomination had been “endorsed” by the Iranian government, Inhofe said. “You can’t get any cozier than that.”
That was too much for Sen. Carl Levin, the usually amiable and tolerant committee chairman. “I have been endorsed by people I disagree with totally,” he said. “I don’t want people who hate me to ruin my career by endorsing me.”
Sen. Claire McCaskell went further, warning Inhofe and Cruz, in a “have you no shame, senator” moment, to “be careful” with their tactics of character-smear and guilt-by-association.
Even Sen. John McCain, the erstwhile Republican leader, seemed abashed by the storm he’d helped unleashed against the nominee a month before. “I just want to make it clear,” McCain said, “Sen. Hagel is an honorable man. He has served his country. And no one on this committee at any time should impugn his character or his integrity.” It was reminiscent of the time, on the 2008 campaign trail, when a woman, fired up by the gunplay rhetoric of his running mate Sarah Palin, started going on about the socialist Muslim Barack Obama—and McCain felt compelled to dial down the passion, defending his opponent as a good American. One wonders, does McCain lie awake at night, gnashing his teeth at the hash that he’s made of his own reputation and the noisome role he’s played in turning his country’s politics into a cesspool?
Still, McCain’s move to reticence had no effect on Inhofe, who clanged the alarm bells still louder. Hagel, he said, had voted against a bill labeling the Iranian Republican Guard Corps as a terrorist organization (because, by definition, it wasn’t). He’d voted against unilateral sanctions against Iran (because unilateral sanctions have no effect). He’d appeared on Al Jazeera TV and agreed with the show’s hosts that Israel had committed war crimes (the first part is true, the second part is not).
On the few occasions during the session when Republican senators explored substantive issues, it was soon clear they had no idea what they were talking about. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican from New Hampshire who has often stood alongside McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham to bash President Obama on Benghazi, tried to make much of Hagel’s co-authorship of a 2012 report by an ad hoc group called the U.S. Global Zero Nuclear Policy Commission. Ayotte expressed shock that, in the wake of North Korea’s third nuclear test, Hagel had not removed his name from this report, which called for eliminating one leg of our nuclear triad. “We have three legs to our nuclear triad,” she said (yes, senator, that’s why it’s called a “triad”), as if it were some nuclear holy trinity.
Ayotte too is new; she seems not to know what a nuclear triad is. She certainly isn’t aware that, even among conservative thinkers in the nuclear-weapons realm, the idea of scrapping one leg of the triad—namely, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles—is at least a respectable notion. The argument is that ICBMs are vulnerable to nuclear attack and, at the same time, tipped with multiple, highly accurate warheads that make an opponent’s ICBMs vulnerable to attack. In other words, by their very existence, ICBMs create an incentive for both sides to launch a pre-emptive attack in the event of a crisis.
But Ayotte’s remarks were seconded by Sen. Jeff Sessions, who does know something about nukes yet seems trapped in 1982. Hagel, he charged, “comes out of the anti-nuclear left,” as if, first of all, there is such a thing these days. It’s worth noting who wrote that Global Zero report along with Hagel: Thomas Pickering, a veteran U.S. diplomat and former ambassador to Moscow; Richard Burt, a State Department negotiator in the Reagan administration; retired Gen. John Sheehan, former commander-in-chief of U.S. Atlantic Command; and—not least—retired Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, before that, head of U.S. Strategic Command, which manages the nuclear arsenal. Hardly a pack of lefties.
Not to sound like a Golden Age nostalgic, but there once was a time when the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee prided themselves on having an understanding of military matters. They disagreed in their conclusions and sometimes their premises. But most of them worked to educate themselves, at least to the point where they could debate the issues, or ask questions of a general without coming off like complete idiots. The sad thing about this new crop of senators—especially on the Republican side—is they don’t even try to learn anything; they don’t care if they look like complete idiots, in part because their core constituents don’t care if they do either.
After Tuesday’s vote, Sen. Levin adjourned the session, saying, “We thank you all, and we look forward to another wonderful year together.” The other senators laughed, but it really wasn’t funny.
By: Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 13, 2013
“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
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