Hagel’s errors about the innovations and strategic benefits the surge would provide and his unwillingness to revisit that view suggest our new defense secretary doesn’t have a clue about the key element of 21st-century war and preparedness — counterinsurgency.
But his failure to understand the surge, then and now, pales in comparison to his disastrous ideas about the key foreign-policy challenge facing the United States: a nuclear Iran.
Hagel is and always has been fine with a nuclear Iran, even though Obama says his administration is not. We’re told one of the reasons Obama chose Hagel was that he appreciated his heterodox views on Iran.
It was incumbent upon those of us who believe unthinkable catastrophe will result from a nuclear mullahcracy (and one whose leaders speak of making Israel disappear) to kick up a fuss about Hagel, if for no other reason than to prevent the administration from subtly and quietly downshifting into a policy of “containment.”
Perhaps most important, the nation and the world had to know there was a serious body of opinion in the United States that would not sit idly by in the face of Hagel’s long history of classic anti-Semitic insinuations about Israel’s supposed secret power over Washington’s decision-making process.
If these warnings, and others coming out of the Obama administration, are to be believed, NASA has pulled off an impressive, if not impossible, feat. But on the other hand, are we really to believe it is the only agency capable of doing so?
I’m going to be supremely cynical here, and suggest that Bolden isn’t being pressured to do this as other agency heads are, because no one cares whether or not NASA shuts down. It doesn’t cause any political pain, as some of the other measures (e.g., TSA reductions) will, so he’s being left alone to manage as best he can.
Every time I read something like this, I wonder if I should start drinking it. As I’ve noted in the past, I don’t want to become one of those people who can’t function (or at least think they can’t) without it.
When he left NYU, Lew received what he describes as “a one-time severance payment upon my departure.” He wasn’t fired, usually the occasion for severance pay. He simply left and got paid for the act of leaving. Hey, that’s Jack Lew — he gets paid when he stays, and he gets paid when he goes.
He went to Citigroup, which NYU had made its primary private lender for student loans in exchange for a cut of those loans. (Coincidences happen to everyone, including Jack Lew.) At Citi, Lew established beyond a doubt his expertise at getting paid. In 2008, as the bank nearly blew up and laid off one-seventh of its employees, Lew ran its disastrous Alternative Investments unit — and got paid $1.1 million.
The bank had to be bailed out by the federal government, but it couldn’t stop paying Jack Lew. The journalist Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg has unearthed Lew’s contract at Citi. It said, reasonably enough, that he wouldn’t get his “guaranteed incentive and retention award” if he left the company. It made an exception, though, if Lew left to get “a full-time high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.”
He shouldn’t have been worth the money (and in many instances, probably wasn’t). But in a corporatist government, this is what happens.
But he can’t, of course — it’s his political stock in trade.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related, somehow. Remember when Obama said that he wouldn’t add one dime to the deficit? Well, he was right — the GAO now says that ObamaCare will add sixty-two trillion of them.
