It’s interesting to see the punditry surrounding Chuck Hagel’s performance in his confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense.
Yesterday, on Fox News Sunday, Laura Ingraham criticized his performance, saying that it may have been the worst ever by a cabinet nominee. OK, that I can agree with. But then she said that he is going to have to stand for a military that is being severely cut back and “still stand strong on the world stage.”
No, he’s not. The hard Left, who is driving the agenda of Democrats, does not believe in national defense. Back in the days of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, I listened to interviews with members of that group, and they didn’t believe in national defense. Some of them believed that the US military should be severely cut back. The rest believed that it should be eliminated altogether. That’s where the Left is in this country today. And Barack Obama is of the hard Left.
Salon Magazine’s Jonathan Bernstein wrote a piece on Saturday commenting on conservative reaction to the Hagel hearings. He wrote:
“It’s sometimes easy to forget just how different the world of the conservative closed information loop is from, well, reality. So it’s always worthwhile to point out examples of it, and this week supplied a doozy: the idea that Chuck Hagel is, as Bill Kristol put it, ‘Obama’s Harriet Miers.’”
Bernstein is right. This is nothing at all like the Harriet Miers nomination, and many conservatives are missing what is going on here. Conservatives objected to Harriet Miers because they felt she wouldn’t be strong enough in defending the constitution. But there is no backlash from the Left on the Chuck Hagel nomination, because they like the idea that he won’t be strong in defending the United States militarily. Yes, Bill Kristol is detached from reality. One of the first lessons you need to learn about the American Left is that they are not interested in how things really are, but in how they feel. They dislike traditional American values, and they simply dislike what America stands for in the world. So a Secretary of Defense who doesn’t believe in defense simply feels good to them.
It doesn’t matter if he knew or didn’t know the answers to any of the questions he was asked.
And his past statements? No problem. They, like Hagel, don’t like Israel either because Israel has values like traditional America. They also believe the United States has been a bully by standing for freedom and justice around the world. So Hagel mumbles a few weak apologies, enough to give lip service to the idea that they actually care about these things, and they’re on their way.
So Hagel is poised to become one of their greatest secretaries of defense.
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