Chuck Hagel: "I'm Surprised That Our Midwestern Republican Leaders Have Not Been More Vocal"

Hagel won 2 Purple Hearts as an infantryman while Señor T was pretending he had a boo-boo

Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo is representing a very blue Miami area district. Obama beat McCain 50-49% and then beat Romney 53-46% there  In 2016 Hillary absolutely pulverized Trump 56.8% to 40.5%, driving the district's PVI from R+1 to its current D+6. Even the virulent incompetence from the DCCC that Republicans in blue districts have learned to count on won't save Curbelo in a cycle with the kind of anti-Trump/anti-GOP tsunami that's forming now. (And, yes, the DCCC has managed to find one of their typical lesser-of-two evils candidates to back). Curbelo recognizes he's got to go further left than the Democrats to have any chance at reelection this year. So, while Pelosi's utterly dysfunctional caucus dickers and bickers about how to deal with Trump's rotten DACA sabotage, Curbelo says he will not vote to keep the government open unless Trump agrees to the bipartisan DACA fix most members of Congress-- and most Americans-- want.

Meanwhile, this weekend everyone has been chitter-chattering about Arizona lame duck Jeff Flake making a Senate floor speech comparing Señor Trumpanzee to Stalin. I'd rather Flake use his vote to stop just one-- any one-- of Trump's legislative priorities... but we all know that's never going to happen.

Chuck Hagel isn't in Congress any more. He was a mainstream conservative from Nebraska, a senator from 1997 til 2009 and then Obama's Secretary of Defense (a nomination filibustered by his old colleagues from the GOP, the first time a Secretary of Defense nominee was ever fillibustered). Interesting sidenote that seems to have been lost to history: Hagel was CEO of American Information Systems, later known as Election Systems & Software, a computerized voting machine manufacturer, which seems to have played a pivotal role in an election that made Hagel the first Republican in twenty-four years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska. In 2008, both Obama and McCain talked about putting Hagel on their tickets.

Over the weekend, Hagel was back in the headlines, talking about the pickle Señor Trumpanzee has placed the GOP in. He wrote that Señor T "is doing great damage to our country internationally. He's an embarrassment... intentionally dividing the country and the world."

Hagel, who served two terms in the Senate, said his fellow Republicans may face a moment of truth later this year with the investigation of Russian influence and interference in the 2016 presidential election already probing inside the doors of the Republican White House.

"We take an oath of office not to a president, not to a party, not to a philosophy, but to the Constitution of the United States," he said.

"I was philosophically a Republican with a conservative voting record," Hagel said, "but that did not mean I would always go along with the party.

"In the end, you need to make a decision based on the right thing for the country," he said.

Hagel, who was wounded twice in combat in Vietnam, parted company with Republican President George W. Bush on the Iraq war and was widely criticized within the GOP for his action with Vice President Dick Cheney often acting as one of Hagel's sharpest critics.

As secretary of defense, Hagel said, he saw Russian cyber activity in all areas of the U.S. economy, with attempts to penetrate commercial and financial networks as well as the Department of Defense.

"The Russians were up to a lot of mischief," he said. "They were probing and they do have the capability of getting better and stronger. We can't discount that."

Hagel left the Pentagon in 2015, a year before the presidential election.

Now, Hagel said, the country has "a president who minimizes his own intelligence community and that is quite astounding."

In the firing of SecDef Chuck Hagel, the person who comes out looking best (or least worse) is Chuck Hagel

In announcing Secretary Hagel's departure Monday, President Obama said only good things about him, but people who work for the president had already made sure that the secretary looks like a bumbling, stumbling fool.

by Ken

Somebody, or I guess I should say somebodies, in the White House, the Pentagon, and the media went to a lot of trouble to portray now-lame-duck Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel as a bumbling nitwit, so out of his depth, if not stumblingly incompetent, that even President Obama, who doesn't hardly fire anybody, had to give him the ax.

I got to watch a little of the president's formal announcement of Secretary Hagel's departure, and while the president said nothing but nice and appreciative things about the secretary's service, the message was already out. And the poor guy was forced to stand there at his executioner's side in front of the cameras for what felt like hours -- and if it felt like that to me, merely watching, I can only imagine how it felt to him.

That somebody, or somebodies, should be ashamed. It's only now, after the public humiliation, that we're getting actual reportage, which tells us that in fact Secretary Hagel did the job he was hired to do, in spite of considerable and relentless interference from persons-still-unknown in or connected to the White House, but that the nature of the job changed dramatically even as the already-impossible complexity of the problems grew even more complex and more impossible.


HAGEL HAD TO GO BECAUSE, IN SHORT --

(a) He did and was doing the job he was hired to do, and the some in terms of protecting the people in his charge from attacks from without (from Congress and elsewhere), but that that job is now obsolete, and --

(b) Nobody has a clue what the new job is, and this is being fought pretty aggressively by those unseen forces who have been making the secretary's job (and life) impossible these last two years. The best guess is that some of the new marching orders are the direct opposite of what he has always been told. Really what the administration seems to be looking for is a wizard with a magic wand. (One who can win confirmation from a Republican-controlled Senate, of course.)

(c) A guy who came into the job convinced, in apparent agreement with the man who hired him, that what the DoD needed was a guy in charge who does not have a personal vision and agenda he's determined to ram down everybody's throat -- that guy is now being berated and ridiculed for not being, say, Donald Rumsfeld.

(d) Throughout his brief tenure at DoD the secretary has been under siege from (unnamed) administration micromanagers who have been making it anywhere from difficult to impossible for him to do his job, whatever the hell that job is. This is, interestingly, interference that enraged his predecessor, Robert Gates, as we'll see in a moment. I wonder whether his administration critics who are deriding him for his weakness mean that he should have screaming bloody murder at them?

At this point, let's look at just a few excerpts from a report yesterday by the Washington Post's Gref Jaffe and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "White House seeks a stronger hand at Pentagon to manage crises."

On Hagel's job description:

President Obama tapped Chuck Hagel as defense secretary because he wanted someone who would quietly implement the administration’s policy, avoid controversy and promote no big, sweeping ideas.

Hagel was forced to resign Monday for being exactly that defense secretary.

Hagel didn’t make big mistakes. Nor had he lost the confidence of the uniformed military. But he often seemed lost or overly deferential to his generals in top-level White House strategy meetings, especially those focused on the battle against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, senior administration officials said.

“I could never tell what his opinion was on anything,” said a senior administration official involved in national security policy. “He’d never speak. . . . The key comment, the insightful approach — that never came out of him.”

Instead, Hagel worked behind the scenes to lessen the impact of budget cuts on the military’s ability to fight future wars and on the families of those in uniform. . . .

"He didn't want to be a larger-than-life secretary"

In recent months, though, as the White House groped toward a policy to confront the Islamic State, Obama decided that he needed a defense secretary who was more at ease in the White House Situation Room than with grunts in the field.

“Hagel tried to play a behind-the-scenes role on tough issues — the [budget cuts], sexual assault, ending two wars,” said Vikram Singh, a former top Pentagon official and a vice president at the Center for American Progress. “He didn’t want to be a larger-than-life secretary.”

His departure isn’t likely to lead to big changes in Iraq and Syria, where the president recently doubled the number of U.S. military advisers, or in Afghanistan, where Obama seems committed to ending the war. Nor is it likely to lead to warmer relations with Congress, as happened when Donald H. Rumsfeld was fired as defense secretary by President George W. Bush in 2006 and replaced by Robert M. Gates, who was widely hailed as his polar opposite.

“No one is going to be hailed to be the anti-Hagel,” said Douglas Ollivant, a retired Army officer and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “No one hates Hagel.”

On White House micromanagement:

“There is teeth-gnashing over micromanagement,” a senior defense official said. “Relations have not been great.”

Under Obama, the National Security Council has delved into the nitty-gritty of shaping war policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan, sometimes subjecting senior officials to hours of meetings to reach incremental decisions.

Earlier this year, the decision on how many U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan in 2015 was the subject of 14 meetings of NSC deputies, four gatherings involving Cabinet secretaries and other NSC “principals,” and two NSC sessions with the president, according to a former senior administration official.

The consequence of those meetings was to pare back the military’s request by just 700 troops — from 10,500 to 9,800. . . .

White House officials regularly call commanders in Afghanistan to gauge their thinking on the progress of the war and their future troop needs. Those calls were a particular source of irritation to Gates, who said he tried to squelch them during the first two years of Obama’s presidency. In a speech this month at the Ronald Reagan presidential library, he recalled being shocked to discover that a direct telephone line to the White House had been installed in the Afghanistan headquarters of the elite Joint Special Operations Command.

“I had them tear it out while I was standing there,” Gates said. “And I told the commanders, ‘You get a call from the White House, you tell them to go to hell and call me.’ ”

NOW, OF COURSE, WE'RE MUCH BETTER OFF, RIGHT?

Yeah, right. The headline on that Post piece, "White House seeks a stronger hand at Pentagon to manage crises," seems pretty ironic, since it seems pretty clear that to at least certain influential people in the administration, the last thing that's wanted is "a stronger hand at the Pentagon," except perhaps "a stronger hand" that will do exactly what they want exactly the way they want it. (As for handling uppity generals, the Obama White House sure has a great track record here, doesn't it?)

Any potential SecDef nominee is going to know a whole lot more than you and I do about the recent history of the job, not to mention the ordeal to be faced in getting confirmation from a Senate controlled by crackpot Republicans, who know and understand less about our foreign-policy challenges than practically anybody on the planet.

The grim reality, at least as far as I can tell from people who really do seem to know something about the history and present of such intractable problem spots as Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan is that there are no good answers for the messes that have developed, and the answers we've tried so far have mostly made things worse, as people who know about those areas could have predicted, and often did.

And the White House is under siege from a horde of self-styled national-security experts whose answers are even worse than the Obama team's.

To all the savagely cretinous Village National Insecurity "experts" perpetually lambasting the president for his incompetence and unconscionable failures, what he should really say is: "You fuckheads don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. The one service you might possibly be able to render to your country, if in fact you give a damn about anything except your self-importance and your scummy careers, is to blow your diseased brains out."

Then again, it isn't at all clear that the president has anybody working for him who's any better clued in. And the cackling chorus of National Insecurity "experts," so distressingly inexpert in all matters save bullying and careerist self-aggrandizement, having tasted blood, and despite having only worse ideas than the administration's, must feel themselves still further empowered. Great. Just great.


"THIS WON'T HELP THEM FIX THEIR TERRIBLE PROBLEMS"

I haven't even mentioned Elizabeth Drew's take as of noon yesterday in a new post on the New York Review of Books blog, "The Firing of Chuck Hagel," which takes an extremely interesting look at Chuck Hagel, his past and present relationship with President Obama, the difficult leap from Congress to any cabinet job (and especially the humongous managerial responsibilities of the DoD), and especially the politics of the present administration mess. It's an invaluable read for anyone who's been wondering what the hell lay behind Hagel's firing. I'm going to quote just the final paragraph.

We’ve seen past administrations in big trouble throw overboard an inconvenient major figure. Whether it was the right one has always been a question. So was the matter of how much difference the move actually made in improving the fortunes of the said administration. Most of the time a White House staff hasn’t been as eager as this one to make it clear, right away, that the officer didn’t resign but was pushed out. This is not a good sign. All the talk coming out of the White House that Hagel’s confirmation performance is still a problem and other complaints are mainly padding on a ruthless if necessary decision—necessary in the eyes of the president and his very closest aides. But this won’t help them fix their terrible problems in Iraq and Syria and—as is increasingly clear—Afghanistan. The senior adviser said to me Monday evening: “If Hagel had agreed with the White House he wouldn’t have been fired.”

Here's how it looks to me. God, do all of these people suck. And out of the whole bunch, in and out of government, the one who sucks least is probably Chuck Hagel.

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A Nexus Between The DCCC And Miss McConnell-- Here's What's Wrong With Inside The Beltway Politics

The DCCC has been howling for 3 days about how Staten Island Gambino crime family congressman, Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm was first for war and then anti-war. "He changed his mind, he changed his mind" has been the constant, annoying refrain, although they haven't said anything about Ami Bera (D-CA) doing exactly the same thing. Even more interesting, when I called the DCCC candidate for Grimm's seat, Dominic Recchia, they said he has no position on Syria "yet." I found that consistent with nearly all the DCCC-manufactured candidates. None of them have positions; all of them are trying to figure out what to say. One of them told me she's antiwar in her heart but that she doesn't want to offend Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman Schultz or, most important, vicious warmonger Steve Israel who controls the flow of DCCC campaign cash. Did Israel threaten her, I asked. "No, but he sent me a memo that confused me about what to say." I coaxed it out of her.

Basically the memo comes from a mirror image place of fear that has kept Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from taking a stand on bombing Syria, something his Tea Party opponent, Matt Bevin, is taking him to task for (though, not his far more cautious Democratic opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes; she's as incomprehensible and afraid to stand for anything as McConnell). Bevin says he's "offended by all these guys that have been sitting around that place gathering dust and moss for decades who are utterly unwilling to lead on and be thoughtful on things that are of this magnitude and this importance... These old fuddy-duddy moss-covered relics are just hiding behind their inactivity in the hopes of getting six more years on our dime. And I think the people of Kentucky, certainly, are fed up with it." Sounding not unlike Alan Grayson (D-FL)-- at least on this issue-- Bevin makes a lot of sense on Syria: "The reason I am opposed to it [U.S. military involvement in Syria] is we have absolutely no business whatsoever being in Syria. There is no military reason for us to be involved. There is no security risk to the United States. There is nobody on either side who is or has the potential to be a true ally of ours because they don’t even remotely believe in what we believe as it relates to freedom of religion, freedom of the press, human rights, basic human dignity. We have no business in being there."

Bevin criticized the administration for even considering getting involved in the Syrian civil war. He claimed it is McConnell’s role to step up and do something about the issue.

“The idea that we have an administration and we have silent ‘leaders’ like Mitch McConnell who are just spineless and refuse to come out and state what they believe, who when they do come out in the case of the administration they say, ‘Well we don’t intend to have any kind of a regime change,’ then what the flying flip are we even going in there for?” Bevin said.

“Really and truly, what is the point if we don’t have an end goal, if we don’t have a purpose, if we don’t have a mission, why would we be sending our weapons, which could potentially lead to our people being involved in this, destroying infrastructure and destroying people in another nation when we don’t have any knowledge of why we’re doing it?" he asked. "Because of some arbitrary line that the president drew in the sand and is now trying to pretend that the world drew in the sand? Really? What a cop out.”

...“One of the greatest reasons we hear in Kentucky for why we need six more years of Mitch McConnell is that he’s so influential,” Bevin said. “He’s so powerful. He’s a leader. And it’s so good for those of us in Kentucky."

"But the reality is when asked if they can name any one thing that that leadership and influence has done for Kentucky, any one thing that power has done for Kentucky, nobody can think of anything because the answer is nothing," Bevin claimed. "The only person who has been served by that influence and power is Mitch McConnell. He is a spineless person and he is unwilling to lead."

"It isn’t specific to any party. There is amazing dearth of leadership on both sides of the aisle. These are people whose primary mission is to keep getting re-elected," Bevin suggested. "When it’s hard and when it’s tough, and when someone truly needs to stand up and lead, they’re silent. They’re missing in action.”

"Spineless person, unwilling to lead" is also an apt description for 6 Democrats running for Ed Markey's old congressional seat (MA-05) in the suburbs around Boston, from Revere and Winthrop in the east, up to Malden, Medford, Woburn and Lexington in the north and then out to Watertown, Waltham, Sudbury and Framingham in the west. The one exception, as we've pointed out: state Rep. Carl Sciortino, a courageous progressive leader who has come out against the bombing. That election is October 15 and voters will be able to send a message to DC about how serious they are in their opposition to more wars of choice.

Now, back to the secret DCCC memo to its candidates, all of whom have been revoltingly mum on the number one issue that voters in every single district are talking about. You looking for leadership on the Syria crisis? Don't expect any from any of the DCCC cardboard candidates. So while you have independent progressives like Nick Ruiz (D-FL), Carl Sciortino (D-MA) and Tom Guild (D-OK) speaking out clearly and in a principled way against war, the DCCC is encouraging mealy-mouthed candidates to hold their fire and keep their heads down. "In short," their wishy-washy memo to candidates begins, "President Obama wants Congressional approval to strike with precision-guided missiles. This action would be a response to a targets in Syria August 2013 chemical weapons attack launched by the Syrian military during the course of Syria’s civil war. The Obama Administration asserts that it must uphold international norms against the use of chemical weapons to reduce future use."

Then comes the facts and figure for candidates who don't know the difference between Syria, Tanzania and Honduras: "Syria is about the size of North Dakota with roughly 22 million inhabitants. The majority of them are Sunni Muslim. Syria is a predominantly Arab country." No, really... that's an exact quote from the memo. Then comes all the propaganda about how Assad used sarin gas on his own people and killed all those children, no less a bold-faced lie than the manufactured "evidence" the Bush regime offered to justify their predetermined attack against Iraq. The "evidence" is anything but clear about who used the chemical weapons and it seems to point to agents provocateurs dead set on persuading Obama to attack Syria. But reflexive warmongers like Steve Israel insist on twisting the facts for hapless candidates, sending them out like lambs to be slaughtered. (And, yes, Steve Israel helped push through Bush's authorization for the use of force against Iraq, even though a big majority of House Democrats opposed him on it. He shouldn't be allowed to use the DCCC for his personal agenda of war.) After pages of worthless propaganda, the DCCC memo end with the arguments, pro and con, for its candidates to consider:

For giving authority for an attack:

• "The U.S. has to attack to uphold the longstanding international norm against the use of chemical weapons so that they aren’t used in future wars."
• U.S. credibility is now on the line: The U.S. President declared the use of chemical weapons to be a red line, and has also asked Congress publicly for support. To deny the Commander in Chief the authority undermines our nation. (Also stated as: U.S. failure to follow-through questions American willingness to engage and gives an appearance of weakness.)
• "The U.S. should stand against the use of chemical weapons generally on humanitarian grounds. Related argument: the U.S. has a history of moral authority we risk losing if we do not act in Syria."
• "The U.S. will intimidate Iran by attacking, which helps Israel (and the U.S.) primarily by reducing the confidence and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) manufacturing intentions of Iran, Israel’s most powerful declared enemy."
• "If we don’t attack, Assad may use these weapons again. Consequences include that more Syrians die from chemical weapons as opposed to traditional weapons, and that the use of chemical weapons could trigger a refugee crisis that is greater than would otherwise occur if the war continued only with traditional weapons. The refugee crisis threatens to destabilize our allies in the region, including Jordan and Turkey, a partner in the NATO alliance that we are also part of."

Against giving authority for an attack:

• "Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States and an attack is not in our interest from a national security or a financial perspective; our excessive debt has already cut funding for the military and domestic programs significantly, and the U.S. experience in limiting costs for Middle East interventions shows we tend to underestimate."
• "There are other ways to put pressure on Assad other than a direct missile strike. This is a premature decision until additional diplomatic options have been pursued." Also stated as: We should go through the U.N. since we are not directly impacted.
• "An attack could create more instability in the region and makes regional American military reinvestment (troops on the ground) more likely. U.S. Secretary of Defense Kerry has not ruled out ‘boots on the ground’ in a long-term scenario resulting from this action."
• "The U.S. lacks a clearly defined and obtainable objective, and the plan lacks any element of surprise."
• "The U.S. did not intervene when chemical weapons were used by Iraq against Iran, or when Iraq used them domestically against the Kurds. A precedent is not created if we do not attack."
• "This threatens American personnel in the region: Iran ordered militants in Iraq to attack US interests (our embassy primarily) in Baghdad should the US carry out military strikes in Syria."
• Potential negative consequences: Our strikes could result in: heavy civilian casualties, Assad killing more civilians with chemical weapons, Syrian army sympathizers attack Americans somewhere else in the world, Assad falls and the chemical weapons end up in the wrong hands, escalation across the board. In addition, the chances that the attacks are so slight that Assad survives them easily and appears strengthened before the world.

And then a warning for any candidates who understand the insidious role AIPAC-- the Israeli lobbying arm in DC-- plays in U.S. politics: "Israel’s Prime Minister has not commented publicly on American involvement other than to say that Israel is prepared in the event that Syria decides to attack Israel as retaliation for an American strike on Syria. The American Pro-Israel community has shown support for an American campaign against Syria, with AIPAC specifically saying 'AIPAC urges Congress to grant the president the authority he has requested to protect America’s national security interests and dissuade the Syrian regime’s further use of unconventional weapons. The civilized world cannot tolerate the use of these barbaric weapons, particularly against an innocent civilian population including hundreds of children.'" How often does the DCCC send out memos from Beltway lobbyists to candidates? They ended their missive with a dismissive sneer to the UN: "Incidentally, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon opposes further military action without Security Council approval, which is not unexpected."



Please watch the video above of Grayson questioning Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry. This back and forth between Hagel and Grayson was pretty shocking, especially to anyone who recalls the fraudulent "evidence" manufactured by the Bush Regime to persuade Congress into authorizing an attack on Iraq.

GRAYSON: Secretary Hagel, there’s been a report in the media that the administration has mischaracterized post-attack Syrian military communications, and that these communications actually express surprise about the attack. This is a very serious charge. Can you please release the original transcripts so that the American people can make their own judgment about that important issue?

HAGEL: What transcripts are you referring to?

GRAYSON: The transcripts that were reported that took place after the attack in which the government has suggested that they confirm the existence of an attack, but actually it’s been reported that Syrian commanders expressed surprise about the attack having taken place, not confirmed it.

HAGEL: Well, that’s probably classified. Congressman, I’d have to go back and review exactly what you’re referring to.

GRAYSON: Well, you will agree that it’s important that the administration not mislead the public in any way about these reports, won’t you?

Grayson kept pushing and Hagel kept dancing and finally said "I have no idea what exactly you’re talking about..." and was probably delighted when teabaggy warmonger Tom Cotten (R) of Arkansas replaced Grayson as the questioner. And what Grayson was referring to was Obama's statement last week that “Our intelligence shows the Assad regime and its forces preparing to use chemical weapons, launching rockets in the highly populated suburbs of Damascus, and acknowledging that a chemical weapons attack took place.” Many intelligence experts have dismissed this as the exact same kind of chicanery that the Bush regime used.

They aren't called cabinet "secretaries" on account of their beautiful penmanship

You might think these are random doodles, but in fact they're the signatures of two U.S. cabinet secretaries -- can you guess which? (If you're having trouble, here's a hint: They're the newest.)

by Ken

Washington Post Loopmaster Al Kamen wants to know, "Is bad penmanship a prerequisite for President Obama's second-term Cabinet?" And the documentary evidence is reproduced above. To make matters more, er, picturesque, one of the above signatures is presumably going to be appearing on all our printed currency.

1. DEFENSE SECRETARY. . . um . . . er . . . CIA is OK?

Says Al:

Newly minted Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel signed off on a letter to a former Senate colleague this week with a scrawly, nearly illegible version of his signature. We're pretty sure it's his signature, at least, but we arrived at that only by deduction, based on its placement. . . .

Here's a letter Hagel wrote to Sen. Barbara Boxer (he apparently wrote an identical one to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in response to a letter the two sent him, but only Boxer posted hers on her Web site).

Hagel added two friendly flourishes to the typewritten missive. In a slash of blue ink, he crossed out the formal address "Dear Senator Boxer" and replaced that with "Barbara." That part we could read.

But his sign-off was nearly impossible to decipher. A strangely formed "C" starts the affair, which breaks down into a strange mountain range in the middle and ends with a spastic-looking shape that one could only vaguely recognize as a "k." Could be, he was matching the informal tone of the opening by signing the note "Chuck."

Or not. Others who've looked at it thought it was his full signature. Other guesses included "eskimo," and one conspiracy-minded viewer read "CIA is OK." What say you, Loop fans? [Personally, I'm getting, um, "Cynde" -- though I admit that what I'm reading as an "n" could be, well, something else. -- Ed.]

2. TREASURY SECRETARY . . . uh, not a clue . . . LOOP-DE-LOOP?

"It appears" suggests Al, that Secretary eskimo "is giving Treasury Secretary Jack Lew a run for his money." But the SecDef, Al points out, "doesn't have to sign all the dollar bills the way Lew does." Which brings us back to a previous "In the Loop" report, in January, when OMB Director Lew was merely a leading candidate to replace outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Loop deputy Emily Heil reported that "the hard-charging Lew probably has a softer side," according to a handwriting analyst to whom she showed this sample.

The roundness of the characters in Lew's impossible-to-read John Hancock indicates that he just might be the cuddly sort, says Kathi McKnight, a professional graphologist, meaning someone who gleans people's personality traits from their writing. Such strokes are common among those who prefer a "softer" approach to problem-solving, she says.

The signers of the Constitution, by contrast, used very strong, angular lettering, McKnight notes -- not that leaders throughout history haven't used circular strokes like Lew's. Like who? "Well, Princess Di had very loopy writing," she says.

And the fact that Lew's signature is illegible may mean that he wants to keep his true identity unknown. "People with illegible signatures . . . like to keep some things private," she says.

Perhaps Lew will want to spruce up his signature before it makes its prime-time debut, as his predecessor did. Current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told NPR last year that he had to work on his penmanship to make his name legible enough to befit its place on U.S. currency.

AS FOR FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY GEITHNER . . .

Emily reported in April 2012 that "there's more to [his engraved] signature than you might think -- or at least, more thought went into it than typically goes into a name jotted on a piece of paper.

In an interview yesterday with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Geithner said he had to alter his typically un-readable scrawl to make it worthy of the nation’s currency.

He admitted that he has "a completely illegible scrawl that did not seem suitable for the dollar bill. So I had to change it so people could see my name."

Emily noted further that despite searching far and wide, the Loop team had been unable to unearth any specimens of the secretary's self-professed illegible scrawl. "The examples of his handwriting we found were on official correspondence -- letters to Congress and the like -- on which Geithner apparently either used an auto-pen or was as careful as he was on the dollar."

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BREAKING: Before Ted Cruz Became A Teabagger He Was An Official Of The Junior League of Hezbollah's Houston Office

The Senate will vote on Chuck Hagel's nomination on Monday, February 25. It looks likely that Reid will be able to shut down the Republican Party filibuster with a successful cloture vote this time. I have no position on this nomination other than he has some good points and some bad points and that the president probably deserves to name whomever he wants to his Cabinet without being obstructed by a Senate minority hell-bent on doing damage to the country for partisan gain.

Earlier today we talked a little about how the Bush-Cheney Regime worked diligently with some of the in-house religionist charlatans to trick gullible and simpleminded evangelicals into fervently supporting their unprovoked attack on Iraq. The unprovoked attack on Hagel last week-- Operation "Friends of Hamas"-- wasn't even something anyone worked on diligently. It wasn't-- at least not when it was created-- part of any right-wing plot. It was just a joke, a joke the Republican base and, tragically, Republican elected officials, took as a matter of faith-- which is what they do rather than ever engaging in critical thinking.

Yesterday a reporter for the right-wing NY Daily News admitted he just made the whole thing up. No one with a lick of sense-- so leave out the GOP-- ever thought for one minute that Chuck Hagel ever took money from a shadowy group called The Friends Of Hamas and no one with a lick of sense ever believed there even ever was a group called The Friends of Hamas. And, of course, he didn't and there wasn't. Ha, ha, ha... joke's on Ted Cruz, the biggest bozo to come riding out of Texas in my lifetime. And Rand Paul. Friedman:

The revelation could have doomed President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense: He gave a paid speech to a group called “Friends of Hamas.”

Fortunately for Hagel, this claim, which galloped across the Internet, was bogus. I know, because I was the unwitting source.

In the process, I became part of an inadvertent demonstration of how quickly partisan agendas and the Internet can transform an obvious joke into a Washington talking point used by senators and presidential wannabes.

Here’s what happened: When rumors swirled that Hagel received speaking fees from controversial organizations, I attempted to check them out.

On Feb. 6, I called a Republican aide on Capitol Hill with a question: Did Hagel’s Senate critics know of controversial groups that he had addressed?

Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?

The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed-- let alone that a former senator would speak to them.

Or so I thought.

The aide promised to get back to me. I followed up with an e-mail, as a reminder: “Did he get $25K speaking fee from Friends of Hamas?” I asked.

The source never responded, and I moved on.

I couldn’t have imagined what would happen next. On Feb. 7, the conservative web site Breitbart.com screamed this headline:

“SECRET HAGEL DONOR?: WHITE HOUSE SPOX DUCKS QUESTION ON ‘FRIENDS OF HAMAS’”

The story read: “On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called ‘Friends of Hamas.’”

The author, Ben Shapiro, wrote that a White House spokesman hung up on him when he called for comment. That went in the story-- to buttress the assertion that the White House didn’t deny the claim.

Breitbart.com used the headline 'Secret Hagel Donor?: White House Spox Ducks Question on 'Friends of Hamas' for piece on potential Chuck Hagel scandal.

Shapiro tweeted the link to his nearly 40,000 Twitter followers. Blogs like RedState.com and the National Review’s The Corner linked to it. In Israel, Mike Huckabee said “rumors of Chuck Hagel’s having received funds from Friends of Hamas,” would, if true, “disqualify him.”

Somehow, I was not aware of the firestorm until Sunday, when I glanced at my phone and saw a Slate.com story raising big doubts whether “Friends of Hamas” even exists.

On Monday, I reached my source. The person denied sharing my query with Breitbart but admitted the chance of having mentioned it to others. Since the source knew we spoke under a standard that my questions weren’t for sharing, that’s a problem.

But there was another fail-safe. Since the “Friends of Hamas” speech was imaginary, it was not like another reporter could confirm it, right?

Not quite. Reached Tuesday, Shapiro acknowledged “Friends of Hamas” might not exist. But he said his story used “very, very specific language” to avoid flatly claiming it did.

“The story as reported is correct. Whether the information I was given by the source is correct I am not sure,” he said.

I am, it seems, the creator of the Friends of Hamas myth. Doing my job, I erred in counting on confidentiality and the understanding that my example was farcical-- and by assuming no one would print an unchecked rumor.

If anyone didn’t know already: Partisan agendas, Internet reporting and old-fashioned carelessness can move complete crocks fast. If you see a story on Hagel addressing the Junior League of Hezbollah, that’s fake too.

That's all they have-- and that's what they are... even if we pay them to be senators.

The R's make history by filibustering the Hagel nomination

"This isn’t high school, getting ready for a football game or some play that's being produced at high school. This is -- we're trying to confirm somebody to run the defense of our country, the military of our country." (Watch video of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today on the Senate floor here.)

by Ken

So they've gone and done it, the Senate R's have: This afternoon, for the first time in history, though they don't like using the word (see below), they filibustered the nomination of a "national security" cabinet position. And they couldn't be prouder. Because these diseased jungle animals were able to prevent the Senate leadership from getting the crucial 60th vote it needed to end debate ("Senate Republicans block vote on Hagel nomination").

Maybe Harry Reid wishes now that he had pushed for a rules change that would have at least required filibusterers to actually, you know, filibuster -- so that the country could at least see them doing their dirtywork. Do you suppose it's just a coincidence that the totally off-off-the-rails Senate R's decided just now that it was safe to proceed with their precedent-shattering shenanigan?

Even now these demented revolutionaries lie their stinking carcasses out. As Rachel Weiner pointed out this evening on WaPo's "The Fix" blo, "They still don't want to call it a filibuster."

"This is not a filibuster," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) announced on the floor immediately after the vote. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) concurred, saying Republicans weren't trying to block the vote, just asking for more time. "If this is not a filibuster, I'd like to see what a filibuster is," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) retorted. On Wednesday, we explained why Republicans don't consider their block of Hagel's nomination a filibuster.

Republicans don't want to filibuster Chuck Hagel's nomination to be the next Secretary of Defense. They just want to require a 60-vote threshold to end debate on his confirmation on the floor of the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has filed for cloture, saying it's a "shame" that he had to do so.

"We're going to require a 60-vote threshold," Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) told Foreign Policy. But, he added, "It's not a filibuster. I don't want to use that word." Likewise, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says he now might vote against cloture, which cuts off debate. But he still thinks "a filibuster is a bad precedent" to set for a Cabinet nominee. No Cabinet nominee has been defeated by filibuster; the vast majority receive only an up-or-down vote.

No, that sack of filth Jim Inhofe, a man without a sane cell in his brain, doesn't want to use that word. Why should anyone give a damn what words Crazy Jim does or doesn't want to use? Well, you can read for yourself the tortured word play by which these lying scumbags try to pretend they aren't doing what they've so gleefully done. As I keep pointing out, when you're dealing with right-wingers, it's insane to make any assumption except that every word out of their mouths is a lie.

SO WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE R'S?

This morning WaPo "Fix"-master Chris Cillizza was exploring the question "Why Republicans are filibustering Chuck Hagel," and allowing for the shilly-shallying you know is going to creep in a Village stooge talks to self-important pols, the answer turns tout to be what one might have expected: because it makes them feel like big shots, and because they can. Here's the fancier version:

1. There's no downside. While the fight over Hagel is consuming official Washington -- and enraging the Democratic base -- Republican strategists believe that not only are few regular people following all of this, but the former Nebraska senator isn't someone with all that many allies outside of Washington. "He's about as unsympathetic a character as you're ever going to see so the political danger is virtually non-existent," said one senior Senate Republican aide. Added another GOP Senate strategist: "Hagel doesn't have a natural base of grassroots support outside the president and Democratic leaders so it's difficult to see any real backlash developing." Worth noting: A Quinnipiac University poll conducted earlier this month showed that two-thirds of people didn't know enough about Hagel to offer an opinion either favorable or unfavorable.

2. The beefs with Hagel are legit. Several operatives rejected the notion that the Hagel blockade is largely about politics. (Worth noting: ALL fights in Congress are at least 50 percent about politics and often far more than that.) "A number of senators have serious concerns with his lack of experience leading such a massive bureaucracy, in addition to his position on Iran and Israel," said one GOP strategist. "And in some ways, this is part of a broader debate and effort to draw attention to the administration's policies in the Middle East.  The longer this nomination is drawn out, the more attention is given to those issues."

3. It's a Republican rallying cry. Republicans thought they would be in the Senate majority right now. And they thought they might also have Mitt Romney in the White House. Neither of those things happened. Instead, Senate Republicans watched their House colleagues ensure they got a worse deal on the fiscal cliff and kick the can down the road on the debt ceiling.  In short: The Senate GOP conference needs something to rally around and Hagel's nomination serves as a useful exercise to do just that. (Also, never forget that Hagel is widely viewed as a wolf in sheep's clothing -- a Republican turned kind-of Democrat -- by most of his former colleagues.) "It's always good to have a ‘support your colleagues' exercise when a Senator in your conference is looking for information from the Administration early in a new Congress," explained one aide. "It ensures you're playing as a team going forward.  It sets a precedent that the conference will not be rolled."

There's no price to pay. Those, it seems to me, are the crucial words.

If I were advising the president, I would be flooding every media outlet in the country with angry denunciations of the treacherous Republicans who hate America so much that to promote their demented ideology and unchecked egos they prefer to have the Pentagon removed from effective control. I would be crusading to make sure that any American who contemplates voting for a Republican knows he/she would be voting for a traitor who wants to see the country destroyed.

Which of course puts the lie to point (2), about Hagel's administrative inexperience -- even though there is a point to be made here. The Post's Walter Pincus made the case the other day ("An image issue for Chuck Hagel"), arguing that his testimony January 31 before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he "appeared to be unprepared and open to bullying," may have fatally weakened him in the eyes of the people he would have to lead as defense secretary. Among senators, Pincus said, "Enough of his former colleagues will accept the idea that he didn't want to be confrontational or that he was having a bad day."

The people Hagel must worry about are the men and women of the Defense Department for whom the hearing was a first look at their next boss in action. It wasn't a promising start.

If there is one characteristic that marks the military it is preparation -- careful planning, covering all contingencies, firmness, clear questions and answers, personal discipline.

Being prepared is a military habit practiced for that moment when lives may depend on it. It's a quality expected in its leaders.

He cited the case of his friend Les Aspin, who was chair of the House Armed Services Committee when Bill Clinton tapped him to be defense secretary.

Aspin was extremely bright and a good politician. But he was casual, if not sloppy, not just in dress but in his habits. He lacked discipline. Meetings with him could start late and go on forever. He loved to explore every relevant aspect of an issue, and even those that weren't relevant.

As one of Aspin's long-term friends, I was among those who warned him that he had to shape up if he took the Pentagon job. His every step would be weighed by the military, from the Joint Chiefs on down the chain of command.

I was sitting in the stands at Fort Myer during Aspin's welcoming ceremony in 1993. I will never forget the murmurs among the officers and enlisted men around me when Aspin, slouching and out of step, reviewed the troops.

Almost immediately he faced complicated issues, but Aspin's easy-going style never gained much respect within "the building" -- the Pentagon. Criticized for Somalia decisions and troubled by a heart problem, he resigned in early 1994.

But I don't think the R's who complained to Chris Cillizza about Hagel's "lack of experience leading such a massive bureaucracy" had in mind the ease with which they had bullied and beaten him at his committee hearing. Here's Walter Pincus again:

The irony about Hagel's hearing performance is that it hid his feisty personality and left the impression he could be pushed around. More than a half-dozen times he apologized for making perfectly acceptable statements, sometimes not bothering to correct senators who took those statements out of context.

Pincus compared Hagel's performance with John Brennan's subsequent appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

The nominee to head the CIA clearly had that agency's staff in mind Thursday as he sat before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Several times he corrected or challenged senators. He told Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) he disagreed "vehemently" with the conclusion that Brennan had leaked classified information in 2012. With Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), Brennan questioned the accuracy of a news story that was the basis for Coats's questions.

In the end, the administration and the Senate majority leadership will probably do what they have to do to get the Hagel nomination to an up-or-down vote and he'll be confirmed -- as an even weaker defense secretary than Walter Pincus was fearing. And the mad-dog Senate R's will have shown once again that the Just Say No-niks are even more firmly in charge than they were in the president's first term.


UPDATE: YOUNG JOHNNY McCRANKY'S AGAINST
HAGEL 'CAUSE HE WAS MEAN TO CHIMPY THE PREZ

I was so wrapped up with trying to get this post done amidst a welter of other obligations that I didn't notice Howie's pass-along of a delicious ThinkProgress Security post by Hayes Brown in which Hayes quotes that crack security expert and man of principle Young Johnny McCranky on the tube this afternoon with another intellectual giant, Fox Noisemaker Neil Cavuto:

To be honest with you, Neil, it goes back to there's a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and say he was the worst President since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people -- people don't forget that. You can disagree but if you're disagreeable, then people don't forget that.

That's right, you heard it from the dripping maw of the Crankyman himself: "If you're disagreeable, then people don't forget that." Honestly, folks, you can't make this stuff up.

If these people were Gong Show contestants, we'd be well rid of them all by now.

#

Will The GOP Slap Down Obama By Torpedoing Chuck Hagel?

I've never been a fan of Chuck Hagel's-- and I'm not about to start now. Would he be a better Defense Secretary than Casper Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld (or, for that matter John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, although back in their days it was called Secretary of War)? He could hardly be worse. But I'm not going to get stampeded into "rooting" for him just because warmongers and partisan shitheads like McCain and Ted Cruz are opposing him. Cruz, for one, will oppose anyone Obama nominates for anything. He was one of only 3 who voted against John Kerry as Secretary of State. Yes, the hysterical, McCarthyite opposition to Hagel is really little more than a temper tantrum on the right and a way for them to express their psychotic hatred for Obama and their insistence than his presidency is illegitimate. A KKK stalwart like Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and his claque will never recognize someone as president who was elected with "colored" votes. As for McCain... the bile and venom and the unending lust for young blood has rotted his brain to a point where he's as great a danger to America as any anywhere on the planet.

The Republicans seemed to behave as the confirmation hearing was about finding the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel rather than someone to run the Pentagon. Hagel didn't do himself any favors with his performance, emboldening the extremists in the GOP to press for a filibuster against confirmation. Unfortunately, people watching C-Span learned more about the venality of McCain, Jim Inhofe and Cruz than about Hagel and about how he would run the Pentagon. The questions were about whatever their pet peeves happen to be in their sick jihad against President Obama... and against America. and, yes... Jim Inhofe gets his information from the Drudge Report. Poor Oklahoma!

Will Hagel be confirmed anyway? Unless the GOP goes ahead with an unprecedented filibuster that the whole demented caucus agrees to, yes. And two Republicans-- Thad Cochran (MS) and Lisa Murkowski (AK)-- have already said they're voting for confirmation. Hagel doesn't even need a single Republican vote to win a straight up or down confirmation vote. He's not going to lose any Democrats and both Independents seem to be OK with voting for him. And the GOP probably doesn't have the guts to mount a real filibuster against a former conservative Republican senator over trumped up charges on lunatic fringe right-wing websites. the kooks and obstructions will, as anyone who watches the Senate already knows, vote no. So? What else is new?

When Bob Woodward tells you to read something, you stand up and READ -- plus other Woodward enhanced interrogation techniques

Watch out, Diane! If Bob doesn't like your question, he can have you get up on the table and cluck like a chicken.

by Ken

I think I've established that I'm not a great fan of make-believe journalist Bob Woodward -- having posed such questions as "Is Bob Woodward the very best person to review George Tenet's book? Or maybe the WORST? (Can you guess which way the Washington Post voted?)" (May 2007) and "Is it possible that Bob Woodward really believes he's giving us first drafts of actual history?" (October 2010). All the same, I wasn't expecting to find myself laughing out loud -- along with some eye-rolling, admitedly -- at the Bobster's grandiose self-fluffing.

However, since I do have some curiosity about the prospect of former Sen. Chuck Hagel's installation at the Pentagon, I was curious enough to take a look at what our Bob has to say in a WaPo column called "Why Obama picked Hagel." And he does have some interesting things to say.

There is, notably, a quote from Hagel presented in the now-familiar Woodwardian journalistic spinoff of insider trading, where the practice of journalism consists of gathering insider information with a view to its highly selective release at the most opportune moment -- "most opportune" for the opportunist in question, that is. Thus we are told that in the early months of President Obama's first term his former Senate colleague came "to the White House to vist with the friend he had made during the four years they overlapped in the Senate" and was asked what he thought about foreign policy and defense issues.

According to an account that Hagel later gave, and is reported here for the first time, he told Obama: "We are at a time where there is a new world order. We don't control it. You must question everything, every assumption, everything they" -- the military and diplomats -- "tell you. Any assumption 10 years old is out of date. You need to question our role. You need to question the military. You need to question what are we using the military for.

"Afghanistan will be defining for your presidency in the first term," Hagel also said, according to his own account, "perhaps even for a second term." The key was not to get "bogged down."

Obama did not say much but listened. At the time, Hagel considered Obama a "loner," inclined to keep a distance and his own counsel. But Hagel's comments help explain why Obama nominated his former Senate colleague to be his next secretary of defense. The two share similar views and philosophies as the Obama administration attempts to define the role of the United States in the transition to a post-superpower world.

I've boldfaced that first part because, hey, are you gonna tell me you couldn't use a good laugh? This business of the later-given account and its being reported here for the first time -- such a gaffishly executed exercise in either fake modesty or circumspection, avoiding the central word in all of Woodwardia, ME-ME-ME-ME-ME.

But this isn't the belly laugh I promised at the outset. Indeed, I have to acknowledge that it will be old news to anyone who read Bob's book, oh, whichever-book-it-was. I can't be expected to keep them straight. Oh, I see it was Obama's Wars.

When I interviewed President Obama in the summer of 2010 for my book "Obama's Wars," his deeply rooted aversion to war was evident. As I reported in the book, I handed Obama a copy of a quotation from Rick Atkinson's World War II history, "The Day of Battle," and asked him to read it. Obama stood and read:

"And then there was the saddest lesson, to be learned again and again . . . that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and that no heart would remain unstained."

"I sympathize with this view," Obama told me. "See my Nobel Prize acceptance speech."

No, no, it's not the president saying, "See my Nobel Prize acceptance speech." I admit that's pretty funny, even if by chance the president actually said those words. Maybe it's even funnier if he did. And after all, our Bob has been slammed so hard and so often over his "journalistic" career for suspicious quotes that almost certainly couldn't be actual quotes that you'd think by now when he manufactures quotes to dramatize something that somebody told him somebody else said, he'd do it better than "See my Nobel Prize acceptance speech."

Again, no, though. The hilarious part is our Bob handing the president of these United States a book quotation with the order to read it and the president by golly standing up and reading it out loud.

At first this may not sound odd to anyone who's watched enough TV courtroom dramas, where lawyers are always handing witnesses stuff and ordering them to read "the highlighted portion," and uncomfortable as they appear, they do, even when they have no direct connection to what they're reading, and you'd figure somebody ought to be objecting.

But the president is an under-oath witness subject to "gotcha"-ing by a crafty cross-examining attorney about to blow the whole case wide open. He's, you know, the president. And Bob is just, you know, whatever it is you want to call it, what he is. And our Bob hands him the quotation and tells him to read and he by God stands up and reads. And in just a year or two the world gets to read all about it.


REPORTED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME: MORE
RECENT WOODWARD ENHANCED INTERROGATIONS

House Minority Leader NANCY PELOSI, on her objection to the House majority leadership's expenditure of millions of dollars to prop up DOMA

Required to read highlighted passages from the 1953 Nancy Drew mystery (No. 31) The Ringmaster's Secret

Senate Minority Leader MITCH McCONNELL, on his search for a Plan B to put in place of his old Plan A ("to make Obama a one-term president")

Instructed to put on a Boy Scout uniform and order five dozen boxes of his favorite variety of Girl Scout cookies (anything but those ridiculous Thank U Berry Much-es)

Supreme Court Justice ANTONIN SCALIA, explaining why his practice of prejudging cases and his habit of hanging out with rich right-wing parties to cases never call for him to recuse himself

Made to sign up for Weight Watchers Online -- though with sign-up fee waived (special "friends of Bob" deal)

Vice President JOE BIDEN, offering exclusive not-to-be-published-till-2016 details about his plans to run for president

Had to stand up and read -- and pick his favorite from among -- a David Letterman-style Top 10 List of "Favorite Joe Biden Gaffes" found online

Treasury Secretary-designate JACK LEW, detailing all his fiscal and monetary plans for these next four years

Asked to recite from memory the Gordon Gekko "Greed is good" speech from the original Wall Street film

Senate Majority Leader HARRY REID, explaining his strategy in the recent filibuster "reform" to-do

Required to stand on the desk and sing his college fight song

New Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair DAVID "THE DIAPER MAN" VITTER, discussing techniques for hiring hookers without leaving a paper trail as well as his recent precedent-defying decision to dump virtually all the committee staff left behind by GOP-term-limited chair James Inhofe*

Called on to strip naked to enable Bob to body-paint the image of Carl Bernstein's genitalia all over him


*SPEAKING OF CHAIRMAN VITTER'S PURGE, HIS
STAFF DENIES ANY ANIMOSITY TOWARD INHOFE

We won't know till the relevant Woodward book is published what Senator Vitter may have told Bob about reports of personal discord with Senator Inhofe and "The Diaper Man" 's purge of Environment and Public Works Committee staff. Like this from National Journal:

One rumor, according to an aide who used to work for Inhofe on the panel, is that the two senators didn't get along.

"From what I've been told, it was due to the fact that Vitter was pissed at Inhofe because Inhofe refused to help him fund-raise because of the prostitution scandal that Vitter faced," the aide said, who was not among the dozen or so most recently let go. "Vitter wanted to purge and get rid of everyone."

However, a source close to Senator Vitter says he told Bob W:

I respect the heck out of my colleague from Oklahoma, and if I found myself in need of a hooker on short notice in the Sooner State, he'd be my first phone call. Besides, nobody has done more to give substance to the belief that God gave us the environment to rape, pillage, and plunder. But every raper/pillager/plunderer has his own style.

Meanwhile at least two energy-industry lobbyists so far confirm receiving e-mails in which the senator wrote:

The only difference between my good friend Jim Inhofe and me on raping, pillaging, and plundering the environment is that he always thinks of it like a one-man mission whereas I'm a strong believer in being a team player, being on the team -- as long as my friends in the environmental-raping industries remember, when it comes time to spread the cash and goodies and cut the checks, that I'm now the guy in charge.

#

AIPAC Agent Eliot Engel Goes After Obama Cabinet Pick As Being Too Anti-Israel

Engel's the Israeli agent in the middle

Before the House Democrats elected their ranking members, we started warning about the potential disaster of putting Zionist extremist Eliot Engel, whose loyalties are demonstrably more to the Likud Party in Israel than to the U.S.A., in as ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Engel, a New Dem and "Free" Trade cypher, was up against another Zionist, Brad Sherman, who isn't as extreme as Engel. House Democratic leadership, though, was intent on filling every position they could with New Dems-- while the Progressive Caucus dozed-- and Sherman was persuaded to withdraw from the race. The Democrats are now stuck with, for all intents and purposes, an Israeli spy as their spokesperson on the committee. And his first goal is to do AIPAC's dirty work against Obama's first choice for Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel. Like Susan Rice, Hagel is a flawed character, another figure DWT has been warning against-- not because he doesn't kiss AIPAC ass but because he was the originator of the computerized stealing of elections.

Obama is Obama and he isn't going to pick and good cabinet members, short of, perhaps keeping Hilda Solis on as Labor Secretary. So it's pointless in getting too emotionally invested in these fights between the insiders. Susan Rice and John Kerry are both equally what you might call useless tools of the Establishment conservative consensus. Hagel and Flournoy are equally useless... although... despite his flaws-- documented in that last link above-- Hagel does supposedly want to cut back on the power of the Military Industrial Complex. Supposedly.

Back to the hideous Engel. The House doesn't vote on the president's nominees but he's already sticking his nose into the process on behalf of Israel and AIPAC, claiming Hagel has an "endemic hostility towards Israel."

In an interview Friday taped for C-SPAN's Newsmakers, conducted jointly by The Cable and Politico, Engel said that Hagel's record on Israel and Iran make him a poor choice to lead the military. In particular, Engel said he was irked by Hagel's reference to the "Jewish lobby" in an interview with former official Aaron David Miller. (Miller supports Hagel's nomination.)

"I think that remark is troublesome, it's problematic. It shows at the very best a lack of sensitivity, at the very worst perhaps a prejudice. And I'm concerned about it, I'm concerned about the nomination," Engel said. "If I were doing the appointing, I would not appoint Chuck Hagel."

Engel, who represents the Bronx, Rockland, and Westchester, said he has been hearing a lot of opposition to the potential Hagel nomination from his constituents. He also said that Hagel's activities related to Israel, including his statements on Hamas and Israel's influence in Washington, show a pattern of "hostility."

"It seems there is some kind of an endemic hostility towards Israel and that's troublesome to me and troublesome to a lot of people," Engel said. "In the sensitive post of secretary of defense, those are warning bells. Those are red lights."

Obama should have the privilege of picking his own team, Engel said, but he predicted that Obama will pass over Hagel to avoid the controversy.

"I think [the president] knows that the Hagel nomination potentially is a problem," he said.

Engel said that former Pentagon official Michèle Flournoy would be a good potential secretary of defense. He also praised the president's Friday nomination of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) to be the next secretary of state.

And it isn't just the AIPAC-Jews in Congress like Engel, Lieberman and Chuck Schumer threatening to derail Hagel. The Republicans smell blood in the water and sense another opportunity to screw with Obama, who never seems to learn that when you give in to bullies-- the way he so shamelessly did by acceding to GOP demands that he name John Kerry Secretary of State, it never-- never-- mollifies them or makes them cooperative; it's only emboldens them. Like predators who have tasted warm blood, partisan obstructionists such as Lindsey Graham-- who have their own careerist agendas to worry about, most of which conflict with the well-being of the nation and are antithetical to American good governance and security-- are on the warpath over Hagel.

Yesterday, the sleazy little South Carolina closet queen was on his perch at Meet the Press hissing and warning menacingly that "a lot of Republicans are going to ask him hard questions. And I don't think he's going to get many Republicans votes... I like Chuck, but his positions I didn't really quite frankly know all of them, are really out of the mainstream and well to the left of the president. I think it would be a challenging nomination, but the hearings will matter, so Chuck will have a chance to defend himself.”

Obama's weak and naive leadership brings this on himself. He only feels getting tough when it comes to his own base. He's happy to use cutthroat tactics against progressives but he's the worst champion the left has ever had when it comes to standing up to the forces of plutocracy and the partisan, reactionary forces of the far right. And if you think he's ever going to change, you haven't been paying any attention.

Israel Is Right To Distrust Chuck Hagel-- But For Entirely Different Reasons

Unless AIPAC can force Obama to change his mind-- or talk enough of the senators they control into defeating the nomination-- it looks like Chuck Hagel will be the next Secretary of Defense. Let's leave his long record of ugly homophobia out of the discussion for now, although "he consistently voted against legislation that would have expanded hate-crime protections to LGBT Americans [and], according to the Human Rights Campaign Congressional Scorecard, he earned a 0 percent for the 107th, 108th and 109th sessions of Congress."

Many Democrats like him because he was the first Republican to oppose John Bolton’s nomination to be Bush's UN ambassador, because he voted with the Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to begin an investigation into the pre-Iraq war intelligence and because he came out against Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq when few other Republicans dared. In 2008, he opposed his old colleague, John McCain and endorsed Obama for president. Fine, fine... but there's something else to consider that has long been swept under the rug, especially Inside the Beltway-- how Hagel's electronic theft of his Senate election set the stage for Bush stealing the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Early in 2003, Thom Hartmann helped expose how Hagel cheated to win his reelection 2 months earlier.

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government-- answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders-- would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."

What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka. "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?

..."The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. "To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."

That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our doorstep.

"They can take over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."

Taking over our election systems? Is that really possible in the USA?

Bev Harris of www.talion.com and www.blackboxvoting.org has looked into the situation in depth and thinks Matulka may be on to something. The company tied to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when she went public about his company having built the machines that counted his landslide votes. (Her response was to put the law firm's threat letter on her website and send a press release to 4000 editors, inviting them to check it out.

"I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states," Matulka said in a January 30, 2003 interview. "God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country," he added, "because they leave no paper trail. These corporations are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting machines."

...Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance of voting over to private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their owners, officers, and stockholders, puts democracy itself at peril.

And, argues Charlie Matulka, for a former officer of one of those corporations to then place himself into an election without disclosing such an apparent conflict of interest is to create a parody of democracy.

Perhaps Matulka's been reading too many conspiracy theory tracts. Or maybe he's on to something. We won't know until a truly independent government agency looks into the matter.

When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete, asking him why he'd not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.

Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, Charlie Matulka had requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel. He just learned his request was denied because, he said, Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.

Matulka shared his news with me, then sighed loud and long on the phone, as if he were watching his children's future evaporate.

"If you want to win the election," he finally said, "just control the machines."

Well, at least he didn't piss off the yentas on the ridiculous Sunday morning TV gab-fests. This is as good a time as any to bring up Barney Frank's new thought piece on the new mandate for the Defense Department, in which he points out that progressives need to stay strong on cutting back on military spending. Remember, Barney was one of the 22 in the group of bipartisan congressmembers who signed a letter this week demanding the military budget be "on the table" in the Grand Bargain deficit reduction negotiations.

There were so many encouraging signs for liberals in the election results this year that one of the most significant has been overlooked. For the first time in my memory, a Democratic candidate for President argued for less military spending against a Republican candidate who called for great increases-- and the Democrat won. George McGovern was the last Democratic candidate to talk about spending less on the military. Subsequently, every Democratic presidential candidate was told that he had better look sufficiently tough on national security because a perception that Democrats were too weak vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was a major point of vulnerability. That is why Michael Dukakis, a public official with an extremely distinguished record, and a man of great dignity and integrity, staged an ill-conceived photo-op of himself wearing a helmet and riding in a tank, which became a negative factor in his campaign.

...In the past few years, with President Obama having completed the withdrawal from Iraq, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and with the announcement of a plan to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014 (too late, but an improvement over the open-ended commitment Obama inherited), it has become possible to get some political traction for our efforts to cut military spending. Because so much of that spending stems from overreach advocated by those who believe that America should be the enforcer of order everywhere in the world-- and because we subsidize our wealthy European and Asian allies by providing a defense for them so they need not spend much on their own-- there has been increasing conservative support for reining in the military budget. Ron Paul, who goes far beyond most liberals in his eagerness to impose severe military cuts, was a popular figure with a significant base of GOP support not despite taking this position but in part because of it.

Earlier this year, for the first time that I can recall, a majority of the House of Representatives voted to reduce the military appropriation recommended by the House Appropriations Committee. The cut was only $1.1 billion-- less than it should have been-- but it was a decision that froze spending at the previous year’s level, and it passed by a vote of 247-167, with the support of both an overwhelming majority of Democrats (158-21) and a significant minority of Republicans (89-146).

Deficit reduction over the long term must include significant reductions in military spending along with tax increases on the very wealthy if we are to avoid devastating virtually everything we do to promote the quality of life at home. A realistic reassessment of our true national security needs would mean a military budget significantly lower not only than the one President Obama inherited, but that which he now proposes. That is, by next year, we no longer should be forced to spend additional funds-- close to $200 billion a year at their peak-- in Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, we can reduce the base budget by approximately $1 trillion over a ten-year period (this includes the $487 billion reduction that President Obama proposed in early 2012) while maintaining more than enough military strength to fully protect our security and those of our allies that genuinely need help because they are too poor and weak in the face of powerful enemies. (Should the nation decide in a democratic way to go to war again, that would require an increase in the military budget, and I would hope, in taxation to pay for it.)

Getting the military budget down to that level-- which would mean a reduction of about $250 billion from what it was in the first year of the Obama Administration-- faced two obstacles at the beginning of this past year. First was the traditional political concern that the Republican presidential candidate would have an advantage over the Democrat on the question of who can better protect our national security. Fortunately, Obama understood that things have changed, and that the American people are ready for a reduction in military spending. Governor Romney, operating in the traditional conservative mode, missed it. One of the most important signs that the public was ready to support a rational-- i.e., significantly reduced-- military budget came during Clint Eastwood’s ramble at the Republican National Convention. One of the few coherent things he said in that memorable debate that he lost to a chair was that the President should have announced his willingness to pull out of Afghanistan altogether. This criticism of the President from an antiwar position elicited cheers from the Republican delegates.

...Given the numbers involved, the major trade-off in putting together a total deficit reduction package is between the military and health care, by far the biggest nondefense spending item in our budget. Reductions in Medicare, Medicaid, grants from the National Institutes of Health, aid to hospitals, etc., clearly will have far worse social consequences than equivalent cuts in the military and, I believe, more damaging economic effects, because there is more of an economic multiplier from the health expenditures than from military spending.

...[B]eing the strongest nation in the world can be achieved much less expensively than at current levels. Obama deserves a great deal of credit for ending the war in Iraq, for committing to ending the war in Afghanistan, and for successfully withstanding Republican pressure to spend more on the military. But I believe he underestimates the extent to which the public is willing to support even further reductions, and I believe that he may appear to be overly influenced by being told that as President, he has the duty to continue to lead the indispensable nation.

The United States was indispensable in 1945 and for many years thereafter, given the weakness of other nations, including our closest allies, and the strength of the Soviet Union. But things have changed. We can no longer afford to be the indispensable nation extending a military umbrella over many allies on whom it is not raining-- and who can well afford their own protective gear if it does. Fortunately, there is no longer any need for us to play that role, and that in turn is fortunate because, for a number of reasons, we cannot succeed at the job when we try.

This all means that a major political task going forward for liberals is pushing for further reductions in military spending, an objective that we now know is not only socially and economically necessary but also politically achievable.