The trumpets had sounded long in advance on the main claim for Mr. Hagel—i.e., that his experience as an enlisted man, a combat veteran, had endowed him with special expertise not given to others, on matters of war, on our nuclear capacity, the size of our defense budget, a capacity to take the measure of Iran and North Korea.
Mr. Hagel had come by this wisdom, we were informed, because he had been at the front, seen men die, and knew, as we were frequently reminded, what the ordinary soldier thought and felt. All of this, the argument ran, gave him a unique capacity to head the Defense Department.
Could rational men and women seriously credit such a claim?
They think that we’re as stupid and illogical as they are. This is almost as nutty as thinking that shouting “What difference does it make?” is somehow an effective rejoinder to your mendacity.
Not all that many decades ago, it would not have been considered exceptional that a senator or congressman had served in the military. The halls of Congress were packed with Americans who had seen war. It says something about the political class today that the experience of having served in the military is such a rarity that it is seen, not infrequently, through a distorting lens. In no other period in the country’s history would it have been considered unseemly, indeed ungrateful, that a combat veteran nominated for high office should be forced to face aggressive questioning.
These new brown shirts don’t understand the cause of the American Revolution.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that again. They’ll lose (again), but a lot of good people will die, and a lot of wealth will be destroyed, even more than by the wealth destroyers currently running the federal government.
…is not about “doing skeet shooting.” Or even shooting skeet. All of this talk about hunting is an ongoing distraction from the real issues, and a deliberate one.
They haven’t really changed that much since the Civil War. The only difference is that they want to enslave all of those of us who won’t bend to their will, instead of just blacks. And as Clayton says, all this kind of rhetoric does is reinforce our desire to defend ourselves and our freedom.
As it turned out, the Hagel nomination has been a fiasco. (Clemons’s chins-up take that Hagel “met expectations” is the most optimism any Hagel backers can muster.)
He certainly met my expectations. I fully expected him to be the hapless fool and tool he always is. And I love this understatement: “Hagel himself does not appear to be especially brilliant.”