Hagel Mentions Impeachment and Anti-Iraq War Position Attracts Many
Senator Chuck Hagel has not announced his intention to run for the Republican presidential nomination. He hasn't even announced an exploratory committee.
But he does have a lot of folks checking in with him for his views because they know he might run and just by entering the race, his brand of centrist independence -- particularly on foreign policy and national security issues -- would affect both Democratic and Republican candidates gunning to move into the White House.
In a much-reported piece that appeared in Esquire today, Hagel actually mentions the possibility of impeachment of President Bush. This is far from political likelihood, but it's pretty intriguing positioning.
From the Esquire article:
But there are no places in Hagel for metaphor. His face is too meaty for poetics, its tectonics shaped by old football injuries and one horrible day in the Mekong Delta when the flesh of it bubbled and burned. His sentences are too often arrhythmic, breaking in the middle, when what he's saying takes an unexpected turn that seems to startle him most of all."The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how this goes."
The conversation beaches itself for a moment on that word -- impeachment -- spoken by a conservative Republican from a safe Senate seat in a reddish state. It's barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence, even though it flowed quite naturally out of the conversation he was having about how everybody had abandoned their responsibility to the country, and now there was a war going bad because of it.
On another front, Washington Bureau Chief for The Guardian wrote an interesting piece on Senator Hagel and a policy salon that I helped host and organize titled "Anti-War Veteran May Rally the Republicans."
The article is not available on line, but here is the pdf , and here is the entire article which is reprinted with permission:
The Guardian Weekly -- Washington Diary2-8 March 2007
Anti-War Veteran May Rally the Republicans
by Ewen MacAskill, Washington Bureau Chief, The Guardian
Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, is one of the few senior figures in either Congress or the Bush administration to have been in combat. While many of them deferred their service, like the chief hawk, Vice-President Dick Cheney, or did a short spell on home soil in the National Guard, like George Bush, Hagel spent time in the mud of Vietnam as an infantry sergeant.That experience explains why he is one of the leading opponents in Bush's own party of the Iraq war. When the president announced his decision in January to increase the number of US troops in Iraq by 21,500, Hagel's comment was one of the most widely quoted in the media. He called the troop surge "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."
Hagel, 60, has not yet announced that he will seek his party's nomination for the 2008 presidential race, but there were few people who heard him speak last week in Nora's, one of Washington's favourite political restaurants, who doubted he intends to run. He was speaking at one of the capital's best-known salons, run by Steve Clemons, head of a centrist thinktank, the New America Foundation. Clemons is one of the city's great networkers, with friends across the city and across the parties.
About 30 people joined Hagel and Clemons upstairs at Nora's: senate staffers, policy wonks, businessmen and journalists. It is an egalitarian salon: no reserved seating and questions open to anyone. Hagel spoke for about 20 minutes on the record and took questions, off the record, for the remainder of the dinner. He sounds like John Wayne and has the same bras self-confidence, but does not share the late actor's rightwing, gung-ho opinions. In fact, Hagel is an unusual Republican, with a complex set of views, conservative on many issues but so liberal on others he could pass for a Democrat.
The front-runner for the Republican nomination is Hagel's fellow senator, John McCain, also a Vietnam veteran, who spent five years in a communist prisoner of war camp. But McCain and the other front-runners, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, have so far not enthused their party in the way that the Democratic party has been lifted by the stellar trio of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.
Almost any political analyst will say it is too early to write off the Republicans, in spite of the anti-Bush mood in the polls. The Democrats' problem is that almost every recent presidential race has been exceedingly close, and next year's could be determined not only by party, personality, campaign style and policies, but some chance remark. Or it could be the candidate's position on the Iraq war. McCain's problem is that he is too closely identified with the war, having long advocated an increase in troops. If the war continues to go badly, and there is little reason to believe otherwise, Republican support for the war could erode and they may look to someone with a record of opposing it, like Hagel.
Hagel is unusual in his party in other ways. He is liberal on many social issues that most Republicans refuse to countenance, such as gay marriage. Hagel says he regards marriage as between a man and a woman, but is relaxed about homosexual or lesbian marriages. And on an issue that is too hot even for most Democrats, burning the Stars and Stripes, he voted for legislation making it a crime but said that he could still see why people might want to do it as a form of protest.
One of Hagel's strongest points is that people instinctively like him. A wealthy businessman at Nora's recalled the first time they had met. The businessman had been braced for a request for funding, as he would have expected from most candidates, but instead the two discussed foreign policy. He came away refreshed that Hagel seemed to be more interested in his opinion than his money.
Hagel's anti-war views are not confined to Iraq. During the Israeli war against Hizbullah in Lebanon last year, he urged Bush to call an immediate ceasefire, something not only the president but Tony Blair refused to do.
He also calls for the closure of the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where more than 300 people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world have been detained without trial. He sees this as damaging America's reputation as a champion of human rights.
While Bush refuses to open dialogue with Iran, sent an extra aircraft carrier group to the Gulf and insists that all options remain on the table, including a military strike, Hagel spoke passionately at Nora's in favour of negotiating with Tehran. His opposition to escalation of the Iraq war and avoidance of one in Iran can be traced to his still strong memory of Vietnam, from which he returned in 1968 with shrapnel in his chest and two Purple Hearts. Like the former secretary of state, Colin Powell, another Vietnam vet and one of the few members of the administration who cautioned against the Iraq invasion, Hagel has seen at first hand what happens in war.
In an interview with GQ magazine in January, he said: "Certainly, going through combat in Vietnam and seeing war up close, seeing friends wounded and killed in front of you, you cannot help but be framed by that experience. When I got to Vietnam, I was a rifleman. I was a private, about as low as you can get. So my frame of reference is very much geared toward the guy at the bottom who's doing the fighting and dying."
What are Hagel's chances of winning the Republican nomination? Some at Nora's, discussing him after he had left, thought he might make it, while others said that he might instead end up as vice-president or secretary of state. Others said that McCain is still the Republican to watch.
But, whatever their thoughts on Hagel's chances, almost all seemed to be impressed by this anti-war senator from Nebraska.
Ewen MacAskill is Washington Bureau Chief of The Guardian.
Whether discussing potential Republican or Democratic candidates, I believe that the single most important defining challenge facing the United States today is our engagement in the Middle East.
America's diminishing prestige, collapsed moral position, and over-stretched military capacity has shown the world our limits. In that environment, enemies have scrambled to move their agendas and U.S. allies are counting on us less. The global equilibrium of interests has been thrown out of whack. Everyone's behavior has changed -- and that has created an enormously dangerous global geostrategic environment.
America's engagement in the Middle East must be redirected if it is to salvage anything from this point forward and if the U.S. is going to start rebuilding its domestic and international standing.
I think that there are a number of candidates on the Democratic side that may move in this direction eventually -- but I'm not convinced that many have really offered more than incrementalist proposals that remain in the same general grooves of Bush's direction in the Middle East. Wes Clark and Joe Biden are exceptions -- and there are others -- but they are not yet setting the political pace of the country.
On the Republican side, Chuck Hagel has the framing right -- and it's a narrative I do hope that he brings into the presidential arena. . .soon.
-- Steve Clemons is Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note
Chuck Hagel speaks out on one issue and he's now a "centrist independent." Can the bar go any lower?
In times of peace, the wise man prepares for war. -- Horace
The blade itself incites to violence. -- Homer
March 6, 2007 4:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
I loved Charlie Pierce's reporting of that conversation.
On the word "impeachment"--"It's barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence..."
It will reverberate a bit longer, I think, in the media.
March 6, 2007 5:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
I get the biggest kick out of Democrats telling Republicans who is going to be a good candidate for the GOP. Hell will need a Zamboni before Chuck Hagel becomes the nominee of the Republican party.
Hearing the Left pulling for McCain is like Republicans saying Zell Miller would be a delightful nominee for the Democrats. It ain't gonna happen.
Zell/Lieberman 2008
March 6, 2007 5:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Even a man of integrity like Hagel won't get my vote. He'd have to do two things he's not likely to do; 1) adopt some progressive domestic policies; and, b) even less likely, apologize on behalf of the GOP for the last 25 years. But, I still wish Republicans would nominate someone like him. It would be a giant step in the right direction. Good luck to all of us if they don't.
March 6, 2007 6:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
It appears that some of us are still slow learners. We have suffered through 6+ years of a Republican administration with a Republican Congress. People with an average IQ should now be able to see what Republicans do when they are in charge of the government. The latest chapter in that lesson book is the scandal at Walter Reed Hospital, where another Republican appointee did another "heckof a job".
So, we, being among those with at least average IQ's, are now discussing an acceptable Republican for President? I keep waiting for the punch line.
Hoppy in Sacramento
March 6, 2007 7:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
J. McCutchen
Could Rudy be a stalking horse (unintentional) for Chuck?
March 6, 2007 7:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
The bar was pretty damn low for George Dubya to get over it twice, Luigi.
March 6, 2007 7:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
J. McCutchen
A testament to the proposition that the Bush Wars and the malignant radicalism that drives them are indeed what many of us have long said - the Greatest Strategic Disaster in US history; the greatest present threat to our security, and the most compelling political issue of the day, the day before and the day after.
Hagel's "centrist" image? Easy
March 6, 2007 7:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
America's engagement in the Middle East must be redirected if it is to salvage anything from this point forward and if the U.S. is going to start rebuilding its domestic and international standing.
I'm not sure I want the US to recover its international standing. The last time we possessed that lofty standing it clearly went to our heads. I don't trust our executive and legislative branches of government; I don't trust our think tank elites; I don't trust our business class; and I don't trust our outsized, secretive and metastasized national security apparatus. I don't think other people should trust them either. Isn't there at least a good argument to be made that the world is somewhat safer, now and for the forseeable future, in an environment in which there is pronounced global skepticism among the world's nations about US intentions, and a tendency to mix one's other foreign policies in with a policy of containment of the US?
It is true that the erosion of the rapidly vanishing US hegemonic system has created a dangerous disequilibrium. The way forward, it seems to me, is for globally oriented activists to work in concert to build an entirely new and far more democratic global economic and security order. An attempt to rebuild the disappearing post-Cold War unipolar order, centered on US primacy, would be a backward move.
On just about every issue but Middle East policy, Hagel is far from an independent centrist, but is instead a committed right wing Republican. At this point, he is far from the progressive voice we need. My fear, however, is that one result of a Hagel candidacy would be to push several leading Democratic candidates to a more activist, hawkish and crusading foreign policy based on assertive transformative neoliberalism, Islamophobia, Russophobia and Sinophobia. Then we will be stuck with a choice between a lousy foreign policy and a lousy domestic policy.
Given the slim offerings thrown up so far by the US political system, my weak preference would be for some kind of Democratic operetta based on a combination of egalitarian Jim Webb lyrics with unifying Barack Obama music. Unfortunately, I think we are going to have to wait for a number of years here in the US for the public and our elites to recover from their hegemonic, end-of-history, triumphalist delusions and join the progressive global movement for peace and demilitarization, economic and social justice, environnmental sanity and broad-based collective security.
March 6, 2007 10:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't quite get why two people troll-rated this comment.
March 7, 2007 3:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Things triangulating Democrats should keep in mind: if they continue to waffle on issues like the Iraq War and holding Bush accountable, thinking that they can count on the liberal vote no matter what, and somebody like Hagel runs as an independent, and has the correct position on these issues, he will suck away a lot of votes from the Democratic candidate.
My vote for starters.
I need to see Democratic candidates actually opposing the excesses of the Bush years. Clinton appears to still be in the camp of saying "the big problem with invading Iraq was that it was done incompetently". I can't vote for that. Obama and Edwards are better, but they also trail in the polls.
March 7, 2007 3:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Then we will be stuck with a choice between a lousy foreign policy and a lousy domestic policy.
Even if we do get a Hawkish Democracy in office in 2009 I don't think we could possibly get someone as benighted as the current administration. At worst it might be Bill Clinton redux (who was not entirely a disaster in foreign policy!) And I would suggest that the dangers of a lousy domestic policy are greater than those of a lousy foreign policy. The latter earns us the dislike of foreigners. The former damages us directly at home.
March 7, 2007 3:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hagel isn't going to run. He'd be a less recognized and financed version of McCain, who is also much more conservative than is generally believed. McCain, though, has a history of bucking the party line. Hagel is a relative newcomer to it.
Hagel would make a decent VP to a McCain ticket, as it would signal the right wing of the party that McCain is serious about conservative issues, and Hagel's anti-war stance and McCain's fights with Bush would give the impression that both are "men of principle."
Wouldn't be the worst thing in the world...a McCain/Hagel ticket would essentially be a repudiation by the Republican Party of Bush and all his works-- even if the Democrats lost the Presidency they'd win.
Noel
March 7, 2007 4:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
I wonder if the threat of impeachment could be used as a club to hit Bush with? Bush certainly doesn't want hearings started to determine what the grounds for impeachment might be, just look at the hearings from yesterday over the fired US attorneys and the conditions at Walter Reed.
Imagine what other dirty laundry would come out if the house started investigating. So the threat could be a good way to get Bush to change his resistance to some long-standing Dem policies. I'm not thinking in terms of Iraq, but rather, domestic issues. Yesterday both houses passed a bill allowing TSA workers to unionize. This could be a good test of the dynamics I'm guessing at.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
March 7, 2007 7:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
TJKING: For the very first time, you and I are in complete agreement, and for probably the last time, I hope you're right.
March 7, 2007 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr Clemons:
I like your work, and I agree that Chuck Hagel's rhetoric is sometimes impressive, but when you talk about Hagel I want to run headfirst into a brick wall. Before you start labeling him a foreign policy 'centrist', could you look at his votes? Fercrissake, the man admitted that he voted against his own bill not--as you have repeatedly claimed--out of frustration at Harry Reid's excessive partisanship, but because he wanted to help Mitch McConnell "embarrass the other side".
If Hagel wants to earn all the love he's already gotten, he's gonna have to start walking the walk, talk's cheap.
March 7, 2007 12:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
How would a McCain led ticket be a "repudiation of Bush and all his works"? McCain is arguably Bush's most important supporter on the Iraq War. And if McCain had his way, we probably would already be bombing Iran.
March 7, 2007 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
McCain also pushed through the anti-torture bill, critcised Rumsfeld publically (though he didn't call for his resignation)for low troop levels, sponsored the campaign-finance reform bill, opposed drilling in ANWR and voted against the FMA. He's conservative, but he's not a Bush puppet like Bill Frist.
An while he's pro-war, inclusion of Hagel on the ticket would indicate that unlike the Bush Administration opposition he doesn't think that opposition to the war is unpatriotic.
Noel
March 7, 2007 3:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
"McCain also pushed through the anti-torture bill"
Huh? He voted for the Military Commissions Act
March 7, 2007 3:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
MOYERS: So this is not just about weapons of mass destruction.
JOE WILSON: Oh, no, I think it's far more about re-growing the political map of the Middle East.
Feb 28 03 PBS - NOW with Bill Moyers
JOE WILSON: Well, the underlying objective, as I see it, the more I look at this, is less and less disarmament, and it really has little to do with terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation of terrorists.
So you look at what's underpinning this, and you go back and you take a look at who's been influencing the process. And it's been those who really believe that our objective must be far grander, and that is to redraw the political map of the Middle East...
CNN - March 2 2003
The president's speech to the American Enterprise Institute the other night made it very clear it's not a disarmament war, it's a war to redraw the political map of the Middle East.
CNN - March 6 2003
Q: In response to the reader who said s/he wasn't trying to be anti-semitic, you said that "his advisors" have argued for years that the way to peace in the Middle East is to crush the Palestinian resistance, etc. Whose advisors and can you elaborate on the history of this argument? It's not something I've heard of before, but then I imagine we don't hear to much about the arguments that go on in our government behind the scenes.
Also, could you tell us a little bit about your company JC Wilson International? Thank you.
Joseph Wilson: We do political risk assessment for companies wanting to do business in Africa Europe and the Middle East.
As to advisers: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol et al. Perle's study group produced a report for Bibi Netnayahu in the mid 90s called "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for the realm." Read also the Project for a "New American Century."
Michael Ledeen from the American Enterprise Institue is another leading figure. He is Mr. Total War. Go to Iran after this.
Washington Post Q & A - April 3, 2003
June 14 03, Joe Wilson -
The real agenda in all of this of course, was to redraw the political map of the Middle East. Now that is code, whether you like it or not, but it is code for putting into place the strategy memorandum that was done by Richard Perle and his study group in the mid-90's which was called, "A Clean Break - A New Strategy for the Realm." And what it is, cut to the quick, is if you take out some of these countries, some of these governments that are antagonistic to Israel then you provide the Israeli government with greater wherewithal to impose its terms and conditions upon the Palestinian people - whatever those terms and conditions might be. In other words, the road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad and Damascus. Maybe Tehran. And maybe Cairo and maybe Tripoli if these guys actually have their way. Rather than going through Jerusalem.
19:40 mp3
On the other ones, the geopolitical situation, I think there are a number of issues at play; there's a number of competing agendas. One is the remaking of the map of the Middle East for Israeli security, and my fear is that when it becomes increasingly apparent that this was all done to make Sharon's life easier and that American soldiers are dying in order to enable Sharon to impose his terms upon the Palestinians that people will wonder why it is American boys and girls are dying for Israel and that will undercut a strategic relationship and a moral obligation that we've had towards Israel for 55 years. I think it's a terribly flawed strategy.
13:30 mp3
Sept '03, by Joseph Wilson
The administration short-circuited the discussion of whether war was necessary because some of its most powerful members felt it was the best option -- ostensibly because they had deluded themselves into believing that they could easily impose flowering democracies on the region.
A more cynical reading of the agenda of certain Bush advisers could conclude that the Balkanization of Iraq was always an acceptable outcome, because Israel would then find itself surrounded by small Arab countries worried about each other instead of forming a solid block against Israel. After all, Iraq was an artificial country that had always had a troublesome history.
San Jose Mercury News
Oct '03, Joe Wilson
It was not until late in the game that the so-called moral war came into being as a further justification. But the people, the neo-conservatives who brought this war upon us, who were the biggest supporters of this war, did not mention the moral case when they wrote the Project for the New American Century, when they wrote their 1998 letter to then-President Clinton, when Mr. Perle and company wrote their paper for Bibi Netanyahu, called "A Clean Break, a New Strategy for the Security of the Realm," or even when Mr. Wolfowitz drafted his security statement when he was undersecretary for policy in the Bush I White House, Bush I Defense Department.
Frontline interview
May '04, by Joseph Wilson
President Bush could fundamentally change the direction of his administration by firing fewer than fifteen senior officials, beginning with those signatories of the Project for the New American Century and those currently holding government posts who signed a 1998 letter that urged President Clinton to wage war on Iraq. They are clustered at the National Security Council, in the Defense and State Departments, and within Vice President Cheney's own parallel national security office. That particular little-known organization -- not accountable to Congress and virtually unknown to the American people -- should be completely dismantled. Never in the history of our democracy has there been established such an influential and pervasive center of power with the ability to circumvent longstanding and accepted reporting structures and to skew decisionmaking practices. It has been described to me chillingly by a former senior government official as a coup d'etat within the State. That's all it would take -- firing fewer than fifteen officials, and the scuttling of Cheney's questionable office -- to alter this administration's radical course.
Salon
Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was so angry about the public statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson's television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public campaign against him, former aides say.
Those efforts by the chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, began shortly after Wilson went public with his criticisms in 2003. But they continued into last year - well after the Justice Department began an investigation in September 2003, into whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the CIA operative's identity, say former White House aides.
While other administration officials were maintaining a careful distance from Wilson in 2004, Libby ordered up a compendium of information that could be used to rebut Wilson's claims that the administration had "twisted" intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq before the U.S. invasion.
Libby pressed the administration to publicly counter Wilson, sparking a debate with other White House officials who thought the tactic would call more attention to the former diplomat and his criticisms. That debate ended after an April 2004 meeting in the office of White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, when staffers were told "don't engage" Wilson, according to notes taken during the meeting by one person present.
"Scooter had a plan to counter Wilson and a passionate desire to do so," said a second person, a former White House official familiar with the internal deliberations.
Oct '05, LA Times
Richard Clarke: I remember vividly, in the driveway outside of the West Wing, Scooter Libby, from the vice president's office, grabbing me and saying, "I hear you don't believe this report that Mohamed Atta was talking to Iraqi people in Prague." I said, "I don't believe it because it's not true." And he said: "You're wrong. You know you're wrong. Go back and find out; look at the rest of the reports, and find out that you're wrong."
I understood what he was saying, which was: "This is a report that we want to believe, and stop saying it's not true. It's a real problem for the vice president's office that you, the counterterrorism coordinator, are walking around saying that this isn't a true report. Shut up!" That's what I was being told.
FRONTLINE: The Dark Side
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski
I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
_
In the early winter of 2002, a co-worker U.S. Navy captain and I were discussing the service being rendered by Colin Powell at the time, and we were told by the neoconservative political appointee David Schenker that "the best service Powell could offer would be to quit right now." I was present at a staff meeting when Bill Luti called Marine Gen. and former Chief of Central Command Anthony Zinni a "traitor," because Zinni had publicly expressed reservations about the rush to war.
Salon - The new Pentagon Papers
Gen. Anthony Zinni
http://undergroundclips.com/video/A.Zinni_60_Minutes-2004-05-23.mov
http://crooksandliars.com/2006/04/02.html#a7762
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A22922-2003Dec22
Gen. Wesley Clark
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,777700,00.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8aOiMmekGk
The War Party - BBC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4MdyJDnSoI
Feb 18 03 - Toxic Talk on War, by Lawrence Kaplan
Washington Post
[NY Times' Tom] Friedman: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.
Haaretz
George Washington's Farewell Address, 1796
A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.
March 7, 2007 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
He also sponsored the McCain Detainee Amendment, which forbade torture-- at least in theory. The Military Commissions Act was something of a compromise-- but even then the wording of the Act prohibits "serious bodily harm." Then Bush appended signing statements saying he'd do whatever he wants.
Again, McCain is not perfect. But he's better than Bush and pretty much every other Republican out there. Giuliani is more liberal on the issues but I doubt he would make a good President-- he won't be able to deal with Congress the way he dealt with the New York City Council.
Noel
March 8, 2007 4:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Bush appended signing statements saying he'd do whatever he wants."
which pattern was well-known by the time of the MCA, and if McCain was half of what he and Chris Matthews pretend he is, he would have fought the bill to his last breath
And even if his ambition had not made him a coward--h/t Charlie Pierce--I don't think McCain is necessarily better than Bush. I think he's even more of a militarist, even more of a lizard-brained believer in "toughness", ie "if we bomb them enough they'll get scared and surrender'.
President McCain would have us in a wider war than Bush, and he could sell it because people persist in believing that because he's not a petulant child he's a better person than Bush. McCain's image and consequent abilities as a salesman make him more dangerous than Bush.
March 8, 2007 7:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. My own thinking is that McCain did what he could with what he had, on the MCA and other issues. More than that, he has on more than one occasion shown a willingness to stand up to the Republican Party in general and Bush in particular, like with the Gang of 14 compromise and the other things I mentioned.
He's running to the right at present, but that happens in every primary. If he gets the nomination he'll cut back to the center. A McCain White House with an effectively led Democratic Congress to keep it in check would not be the worst of all possible worlds.
Noel
March 8, 2007 8:44 PM | Reply | Permalink