That’s what Senator Bob Corker hinted at on “This Week” yesterday. So far there haven’t been many articles on Chuck Hagel’s alleged mistreatment of staffers, but it sounds like this may turn into a bigger issue:
This morning on “This Week,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee expressed concerns about the “temperament” of Chuck Hagel, the man President Obama nominated to be his next Secretary of Defense.
“Just his overall temperament and is he suited to run a department or a big agency or a big entity like the Pentagon,” Corker told me. “I think there are numbers of staffers who are coming forth now just talking about the way he has dealt with them. I have, certainly questions, about a lot of things.”
Corker went on to say he wouldn’t necessarily oppose Hagel’s nomination over this, but it adds another bullet point to the growing case against Hagel. As Elliott Abrams writes at NRO, policy objections alone tend to be a weak argument against confirmation. But questions about competence, temperament, management ability, personal character, etc.–combined, these could make a powerful case. If former staffers start speaking out to the media, or show up to testify at the hearings, that could prove very damaging.
It’s also not as if Obama is defending Hagel’s controversial policy positions. Quite the opposite; the argument for the defense secretary nominee is that he’s come around to Obama’s (professed) stance on Iranian sanctions and the use of military force. So while the president should be able to choose someone who shares his views–even if these views are controversial–there are real questions about whether Hagel actually does.
Do not forget that it was allegations of heavy drinking that did in the Tower nomination — and that Anita Hill almost did in the Clarance Thomas confirmation.r nr nIf we have a gay or female former staffer showing up with a story to tell, that will truly get interesting…
"…it was allegations of heavy drinking that did in the Tower nomination…" n nSince you bring up the subject, Hagel has the deeply worn features of a long term alcohol abuser. And his reported personal meanness is typical of certain types of heavy drinkers. No evidence. Just saying.
I am aware of both, as well as a third thing — intoxicated heterosexual males often have interactions with young ladies that become problematic when the young ladies testify about the same, and yes that is what I am expecting to come out in the hearings. n nHowever I am adamant — no evidence, no allegation. Absent evidence, I am not going to make this allegation… n
"It’s also not as if Obama is defending Hagel’s controversial policy positions. Quite the opposite; the argument for the defense secretary nominee is that he’s come around to Obama’s (professed) stance on Iranian sanctions and the use of military force." n nObama is almost certainly lying. And no, I am not engaging in a cheap shot. The man has a very well established record of being deceitful. Chuck Hagel and the president agree completely regarding Israel and Iran. They want the Jewish state to appease its enemies. Israel's alleged belligerence is supposedly the reason for the tensions in the Middle East.
It's actually worse than this — and don't ever think it is about Israel. Israel is too small a country to have such global significance on its own. n nNo, the fate of Israel is about the future of the West — Israel is about the question of if the values of people such as John Locke are to prevail in the world or if they are to be replaced by the dictatorship of the collective and if the individual is to become irrelevant. (Think "Borg" on Star Trek.) n nJohn Locke argued that God granted each individual certain inalienable rights, notable the rights to the individual's "Life, Liberty, & Property." At the time, "property" had two meanings much as "man" does today, which is why I have changed Locke's "man" to "person" and likely is why Thomas Jefferson changed "property" to "pursuit of happiness." n n"Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence, one of this nation's founding documents, and perhaps most telling where these people were coming from is the story of two women who asked Ben Franklin what kind of a government had been decided upon after the 1787 Constitutional Convention and his response "a republic if you can keep it." n nThe difference between a republic and a democracy is told as the story of two wolves and a lamb having a discussion as to what they will eat for dinner — in a democracy, it is a 2-1 vote that it will be lamb — but in a republic, where there are protections for individual rights — the lamb has a right not to be eaten and it doesn't matter how lopsided the vote may be. The individual has rights that can not be taken away by either "the tyranny of the majority", by a powerful despot, or by religious edict. n nAnd as to the theocratic state, Islam is by no means the first religion to be intolerant — there is a lot of Massachusetts history that people don't know that much about, including the saying that "the Quakers won the battle by sending more people into Massachusetts than the Puritans were willing to hang" — and the visceral reaction to Mary Dyer being hung on Boston Common in 1660 was really the start of religious freedom in this country — and to some extent to the world. n nThere are two reasons why I will *never* refer to Israel as "the Jewish state" — one of which is that Israel is not a theocracy, it is not a country where the power of the state is used to enforce full conformity with religious edict. John Winthrop's Boston — all of Massachusetts — very much was a theocracy throughout all of the 17th Century and in addition to the legal conviction/execution of Quakers, there were the battles with the German immigrants over the celebration of Christmas (which the Puritans prohibited) and the infamous 1691-2 Salem/Danvers Witch Hysteria. Iran today is a theocracy — this is what Sharia Law is. n nIsrael is a country that is something like 80% Jewish, and one where the Rabbis undoubtedly have a great deal of political influence. But it is not a theocracy — Israeli Rabbis don't have the legitimate use of force — direct or indirect — to me to be a Jew. I doubt that frying pork chops on a BBQ is *the* most offensive thing possible to Judaism, I am not sure what actually would be, but assume for the sake of argument that it is. That everyone knows that it is. n n(continued as reply below)
(continued from above) n nI have no doubt that as long as I met basic fire code and such — whatever rules everyone cooking anything over an open fire has to meet — I could BBQ my pork chops with impunity. I have no doubt that the Israeli police would come to my assistance should someone try to stop me – that the legitimate use of force would be used to *protect* me and not to stop me. And while I might not find a lot of customers, as long as I again met whatever food vending rules there are, I could legally sell my pork chops to anyone who wished to buy one. n nAnd while I would be required to use whatever units of measurement the government requires (I believe metric), if I were selling soda, I could sell it in cups as big as I desired. Compare this to Mayor Bloomberg's New York City which has the limit on the size of the cup one may sell. And while it isn't fair to summarize an entire country on the basis of the dozen or so people you have met from there, reflecting upon the Israelis I have met, my take is that the Israeli citizenry wouldn't tolerate their government telling them what size cups they are allowed to have and there would be consequences to whatever politician(s) were behind such a rule. n nSo this isn't just about Islam. It is about personal freedom versus the power to control the lives of others. Forcing them to conform with the edicts of a religion is one aspect of it but it goes way beyond that into the sorts of stuff that Mssrs. Obama & Bloomberg seek to do, the general movement away from the individual to the collective. The question of who should raise children — and I would not be surprised to find that Israel has far fewer non-widowed single mothers than we do. n nIsrael is about the right of the individual to be different — which is quite offensive to those of the collective mindset. Israel is about the right of self defense — as is the opposition to gun control here in America — it is the right of the individual to be different and to be able to defend himself against those who would use violence to intimidate him into conformity. n nObama doesn't want a strong Israel because a strong Israel whose citizens can be every bit as Jewish as they want to be (or not be) — in open defiance of the majority of people in that region; the ability of Israel to defend itself from bullying thugs — instead of having to appease them; these are all things that raise issues Obama doesn't want raised domestically. n nReagan built a nearly 500 ship navy. We are now down to about 200 or so, likely to drop lower, and in a few years the ChiComs will have more boats than we do. A lot of people on the political left (from whence Obama comes) have long wanted a weak America and a weak West — they not only don't believe in the superiority of Western values but they really want to enable others to impose their values upon us. n nThis isn't really about Israel…
of course Obama's "almost certainly lying." and there's no way to read the Hagel nomination other than as a slap in the face of–well, take your pick: neocons, the "Jewish Lobby," Republicans, evangelical Christians, and probably Bibi Netanyahu personally too. all the people Obama and the Left despise.