The Breaking of Chuck Hagel

A small excerpt from Larry Derfner’s 972mag piece, on Hagel’s forced recantation:

What an embarrassing thing to watch. What a blood-chilling, Orwellian bunch, these interrogators, especially Lindsey Graham. Feeding them is the most virulent branch of the pro-war/anti-Muslim lobby: Sheldon Adelson, the Emergency Committee for Israel and Weekly Standard magazine, led by their hit men William Kristol, Michael Goldfarb and Noah Pollak.

Hagel needs five Republican votes to get confirmed as secretary of defense; reports are that it’s touch and go. At this point, I don’t think it matters; he’s been so compromised, so smacked around by Israel’s enforcers, that he’d probably be afraid to say anything but “yes” to Netanyahu once he got to the Pentagon.

This was a spectacle of America and Israel at their worst. It was the worst of the Obama administration, too, a reminder of why this president’s second term is unlikely to be any better than his first as far as the Middle East is concerned.

Oh well. So much for Chuck Hagel. Another great white hope vanquished.

 

Galileo’s inquisitors would have been green with envy at this particularly unedifying spectacle!