There’s simply no elevating it. Sen. McCain’s (R-AZ) entire game here is about score settling and holding on to what is arguably the only thing he was right about in the last 20 years. The ‘surge’ McCain may have been right about. There’s a decent argument. But, of course, this is one move in the larger Iraq story which is undeniably one of the biggest foreign policy catastrophes in modern American history — and one which John McCain is one of the great authors of. What a sad little man.
The country is still paying a great cost for the ego bruise that Sen. McCain suffered in 2008. Even more than that, he’s stung by the mountains of criticism tied to his original advocacy of the Iraq War and all the lies that brought the country into it. It stings. Thus the endless flogging of the surge. This is payback. Nothing more.
Wake me up when McCain tells Hagel to get off his lawn.
11:35 — Brutal civil war in Syria. A partial al-Qaeda takeover of northern Mali. Terror groups operating with impunity in Somalia and Yemen. The growing possibility of an Israeli strike on Iraq. You get the idea. The Obama administration is facing incredibly complicated national security challenges around the globe. As defense secretary, Chuck Hagel would help shape how the U.S. should try to handle them. But Republican senators like Jeff Sessions aren’t really asking about any of those current challenges. Read More
TPM’s Eric Lach dug around and found 20 states where lawmakers have proposed measures to put a stop to federal gun laws in recent weeks. Some would like to arrest federal officers who try to enforce the laws. Others simply want to make it very hard for the feds to do their jobs. So what’s behind the state-by-state movement? Here’s our report.
12:05 — Here in Washington, sequestration – the mandatory budget cuts which are scheduled to go into effect March 1st — is a really big deal. There is little question that it will hammer an already-fragile economic recovery. Government contractors, particularly defense companies, are preemptively laying off workers, and the Pentagon and other government departments have told their civilian employees that they’ll have to take unpaid furloughs if it isn’t averted. Panetta and Dempsey have warned that the cuts would devastate the Pentagon and seriously threaten American national security. Obama and an array of Republican leaders say they want to find a way of getting rid of it. But no senator from either party has really asked Hagel about it. Read More
1:40 — Hagel’s now-infamous line about the “Jewish lobby” is continuing to cause him grief. Senator after senator has bashed him for using those two words, and Hagel has repeatedly tried to defuse the criticism by acknowledging that he misspoke and shouldn’t have used the phrase. Lindsey Graham, one of the best questioners on the panel, just used a different part of the quote to bash Hagel. Hagel’s full comment in 2006 was that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here… I have always argued against some of the dumb things they do because I don’t think it’s in the interest of Israel.” Graham asked Hagel to name a senator who had been intimidated by the pro-Israel lobby or a “dumb thing” that the Senate had done as a result. Hagel admitted that he couldn’t. Hagel had obviously been heavily coached about how to talk about the “Jewish lobby” part of the quote. He was clearly unprepared to fight off criticism about the rest of the comment.
It’s surprising to me that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wasn’t born in the same year Sen. Joe McCarthy died. Can reincarnation still work that way?