[Vision2020] Senators Overboard!

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
February 15, 2013
Senators Overboard! By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

We seem to be short one secretary of defense.

Well, there’s Leon Panetta, who has already had his farewell ceremony,
given his farewell briefing and his farewell address, then flown home to
California. But the Pentagon probably still has his cell number in case a
war breaks out.

And there’s Chuck Hagel, nominated yet totally-still-not-confirmed by the
U.S. Senate. A Senate that is beginning to resemble a bad Carnival cruise.
They’re dead in the water, nothing’s working and the chief engineer is
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

People, what do you think happened with Lindsey Graham? Have you noticed
that lately he seems to be on television more often than the Geico gecko?
How does he manage to get himself interviewed so much? Do you think he
lives in a tent outside one of the studios? Graham doesn’t hold any Senate
position higher than ranking member of the Armed Services subcommittee on
personnel. Yet there he is, on the air all the time, denouncing something.

And what do you think has happened to John McCain? Actually, we’ve had that
conversation a number of times before.

When it comes to the Hagel nomination, McCain is supposed to be the
Republican point man. If we were on a Carnival cruise, he would be the
captain. A captain who got on the P.A. and announced that the ship was
going to Mexico. No, Alabama! No, in a circle! Or maybe we’ll just stay
dead in the water until a week from Tuesday and see what happens.

Both McCain and Graham have changed their tune repeatedly over what the
critical, central problem is about making Chuck Hagel the secretary of
defense. The goal posts have not just been moved; they’ve been put on a
tractor-trailer and driven down every highway exit in the continental
United States.

The complaints about Hagel that have come up so far range from the
perfectly reasonable (seems to have trouble communicating), to the
perfectly lunatic. During debate in the Senate Armed Services Committee,
James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican, suggested that Hagel had
been “endorsed” by “terrorist-type countries.” This presumably had to do
with a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry saying he hoped Hagel’s
nomination would improve relations between the two countries.

Let us all stop for a minute here and say a prayer that someday a spokesman
for the International League of Puppy Murderers appears out of nowhere to
announce that he thinks James Inhofe would make a great animal warden.

McCain and Graham have been particularly obsessed with the attack on the
American mission in Benghazi, Libya — from the “talking points” given to
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to the president’s
phone calls in the wake of the tragedy. “I’m not going to stop until we get
to the bottom of it,” Graham said on — yes! — a Sunday morning talk show.

The only problem is that Hagel wasn’t in government when the attack
occurred. He had nothing to do with it. Watching the Republicans fight this
nomination over Benghazi is sort of like watching the crew of a disabled
cruise ship racing around yelling about a bridge being out on the Amtrak
route to Montreal.

On Thursday, the Republicans declined to permit an up-or-down vote on the
Hagel nomination, something that has never before happened with a
prospective secretary of defense.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee argued that it wasn’t such a big deal,
because there were plenty of precedents for holding up even good ideas for
no reason whatsoever. He pointed to the dreadful time 20 years ago when a
single senator from Ohio caused an 87-day delay on “a fairly
noncontroversial nominee” for secretary of education. Who happened to be
Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

The Republicans said what they were doing didn’t count as a filibuster
since they just wanted to bring all progress to a screeching halt *
temporarily*, while the senators took more time to study the issues. This
translates into letting the Tea Party crazies have another week to look for
a smoking gun — in the form, perhaps, of a hitherto-undiscovered video of
Chuck Hagel on a camel, leading a tribe of Bedouins across the desert in an
attack on Aqaba.

“After the break, we can have a cloture vote, and I feel pretty comfortable
I’d vote to move on — unless there’s some bombshell,” said Graham.

Let’s take a vote ourselves. Would you rather have the Senate:

A) Spend one week on vacation studying and then the last week of the month
debating Chuck Hagel, or

B) Stay right where they are and figure out what to do about those
enormous, economy-blasting spending cuts that are scheduled to kick in
March 1.

O.K., I see a whole lot of hands for staying and fixing the spending cuts.
None of you are ever going to get to be a U.S. senator.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20130216/bc1faed2/attachment-0001.html>