Chuck Hagel -- now offering the sanest thinking on Iraq

[Auggie27]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 11:57am

If there is one hero this week in the debate over this debacle, it's the clear-headed, tough talking Chuck Hagel. Denouncing the Bush "augmentation" as the worst blunder since Vietnam was the sanest take. Having watched him take on Rice with necessary outrage and now this morning, the pandering and smugly patronizing Joe Lieberman ("I have children and grandchilddren to protec" Hagel: "So do I, don't insult me."), I believe Hagel is the single savviest voice in Washington on this war. And his take is devoid of sidebars invoking 9/11 or smokescreen mumbo-jumbo about the war in Iraq "following us home." I'm a rabid Democrat who will listen to Republican Hagel on this issue at any key turn.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 12:50pm

There's a reason W has appeared to age 10 years in the last 12 months. Even he and his yes people can't ignore the writing on the wall any longer: Worst. President. Ever.

I know many Bush friends and family make money hand over fist no matter how badly Iraq goes. But what about those with no apparent financial conflicts of interest? For example, what of the Supreme Court justices who handed him his first term? Do you think they ever have moments, maybe as they're trying to drift off to sleep, when they look at all that has gone wrong since that decision and are filled with regret?

[Elphaba]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 12:51pm

"most sane" probably would have been a better choice....

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 1:17pm

I hope the Supreme Court justices who put him in power come to understand in time how they destroyed the dignity and the authority of the Court, and I hope the Republican voters who enabled a man who was not worthy of the office come to understand that they put into power a man who ruined the integrity of the nation and led American servicemembers to death and dismemberment, innocent Iraqis to death and disorder and the citizens of the great American treasure of New Orleans to death and despair.

Thanks, Chuck Hagel, but it's not enough. Disempower the president.

[StageManager2]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 1:23pm

*cue for Mr Roxy to pop in and say "Why don't we just blame Bush for the car breaking down or the pencil tip breaking?"*

[Unknown User]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 1:26pm

i was looking @ the sunday lineups this morning & i thought, "good grief, aside from carl levin, hagel is the closest thing to 'liberal' that they are allowing on the air!"

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 2:04pm

Excerpt from today's Frank Rich column:

"The question now is how to minimize the damage before countless more Americans and Iraqis are slaughtered to serve the president’s endgame of passing his defeat on to the next president. The Democrats can have all the hearings they want, but they are unlikely to take draconian action (cutting off funding) that would make them, rather than Mr. Bush, politically vulnerable to blame for losing Iraq.

"I have long felt that it will be up to Mr. Bush’s own party to ring down the curtain on his failed policy, and after the 2006 midterms, that is more true than ever. The lame-duck president, having lost both houses of Congress and at least one war (Afghanistan awaits), has nothing left to lose. That is far from true of his party."

[HDThoreau2]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 2:55pm

George Bush is far from the first President to loose control of congress during his term office. It took Clinton only two years to achieve that feat.

I guess that Clinton always was a premature achiever.

[HDThoreau2]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 2:56pm

Here's the worst President ever.
Jimmy Carter: The Worst President EVER

[Unknown User]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 3:03pm

oh, go suck walden pond through a leaky straw.

[Auggie27]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 3:33pm

As this war chokes our present and robs our future, I'm personally depressed that only Hagel makes me sit up and take notice. Our own are not stepping up adequately. We have radically new profiles to offer -- a white woman and a black man -- and both are inadquate. Hillary's still in fact-finding more, and tought it's not popular to admit, but even as of the a.m., Obama is too measured, too cautious, and frankly, his words are backed by too little experience.

No wonder Fox News is focused on Barbara Boxer. The rest of the Democrats are still being too damned polite in the face of death, and the prospect of a lot more.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 4:43pm

Here's ALL of what Ford said on Carter and several other Presidents (he was actually harsher on Reagan than Carter):

"According to the newspaper, Ford declined to rate George W. Bush , saying he did not know him well enough.

Ford said Reagan, who challenged him unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination in 1976, was "a great spokesman for attractive political objectives" such as a balanced budget and defeating communism, "but when it came to implementation, his record never matched his words."

Reagan was "probably the least well-informed on the details of running the government of any president I knew," Ford said. In a separate interview, he said Reagan "was just a poor manager, and you can't be president and do a good job unless you manage.

"It makes me very irritated when Reagan's people pound their chests and say that because we had this big military buildup, the Kremlin collapsed," Ford told The Grand Rapids Press.

Ford contended his own negotiation of the Helsinki accords on human rights did more to win the Cold War than Reagan's military buildup.

The best president of his lifetime, Ford said, was a more moderate Republican : Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Harry Truman "would get very high marks" for his handling of foreign crises, Ford said. He also praised Richard Nixon as a foreign policy master, despite the Watergate scandal that drove him from office.

Ford considered John F. Kennedy overrated and Bill Clinton average. He admired George H.W. Bush 's handling of the Persian Gulf War and had mixed opinions of Carter, who defeated Ford in 1976.

In 1981, Ford said: "I think Jimmy Carter would be very close to Warren G. Harding. I feel very strongly that Jimmy Carter was a disaster, particularly domestically and economically. I have said more than once that he was certainly the poorest president in my lifetime."

But two years later, he praised Carter's performance on the Panama Canal treaty, China and the Middle East. And in 1998, he said Carter "will be looked on as a better president than some comments we hear today.

"He was a very decent, fine individual," Ford told the paper. "There were no major mistakes. There just weren't a lot of exciting results."



http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/fords-remarks-on-presidents-printed/20070114130309990001

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 4:49pm

Oh Margo! Gerald Ford didn't have a blahhhhhhhhg nobody ever visited or made comments on, so who cares what HE had to say? Tee hee.

[HDThoreau2]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 8:04pm

You are exactly like he said you would be.

Hilarious.

And even the most strident of liberals wouldn't dare to defend Carter.
Jimmy Carter: The Worst President EVER

[HDThoreau2]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 8:19pm

From The Washington Times:
January 14, 2007

Jimmy Carter Embarrasses Himself and America Again...

For 14 members of the Carter Center's board of councilors who resigned on Thursday, the former president's most recent book, "Palestine; Peace not Apartheid" was so one-sided, biased and factually deficient that they felt they could no longer serve as advisers. We commend their principled stand.

Mr. Carter "confused opinion with fact, subjectivity with objectivity and force for change with partisan advocacy," the former Carter loyalists wrote. "You have clearly abandoned your historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side," the board members continued in the letter addressed to Mr. Carter. The agenda of the Carter Center has been permanently marred by the book's clear prejudice.

Mr. Carter has been rightly chastised for effectively ignoring Palestinian terrorism as well as rewriting or simply omitting basic historical facts of the conflict in a loathsome effort to dump blame for the failure of peace entirely on Israel. Also abhorrent is that Mr. Carter's book seems to sanction violence against Israel, calling on terrorist groups to "make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." Mr. Carter has condemned the violence, but rational and impartial observers of the Israel-Palestinian conflict should nevertheless be appalled, as the 14 advisers to the Carter Center were, by the implications of this statement.

As critics have pointed out, not only is Mr. Carter's book factually flawed -- and often egregiously so -- but the former president has refused to admit, much less amend, the blatant inaccuracies in his subsequent media appearances. In an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times, for example, Mr. Carter attributed the criticism of his book to "severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts" and blamed lack of criticism of Israeli policies on Israel's lobbying efforts. But if facts are what really interest Mr. Carter, his book certainly does little to prove it. A book riddled with errors blurs the line between advocacy and propaganda -- far from the "free and balanced discussion" that Mr. Carter claimed to want.

It's now clear even to those who have respected and supported Mr. Carter and his noble humanitarian work that the former president has lost the pretense of being an honest broker. Thanks to his book, Mr. Carter, the 2002 Nobel Peace honoree, has lost his once-credible standing in Middle East affairs.

Jimmy Carter: The Worst President EVER

Updated On: 1/14/07 at 08:19 PM

[kjklo]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 9:35pm

I'm not "the most strident of liberals" and I do dare to defend Carter (all the time). Guess what, many ordinary people all over middle America do the same. Believe it or not, he's highly respected by all kinds of Americans, even those who don't qualify as liberals or elitists. I live in Missouri and work with people who aren't even faintly "elitists" (horribly misleading right-wing term) and Carter is widely looked-up to and considered a decent and honorable man.

[HDThoreau2]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 10:02pm

I'm glad that you feel you can stand up for him. Fourteen people that he selected to serve as advisers quit on him due to his dishonesty.

He's a national embarrassment.
Jimmy Carter: The Worst President EVER

[kjklo]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 11:45pm

What about the other 186 advisors to his Center who did not quit? 14 is only 7%. Quit exaggerating.

[HDThoreau2]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 11:54pm

I did not exaggerate, I stated that fourteen quit.

He is still the worst President ever.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 1/14/07 at 11:55pm

why is Chantipoo quoting Rev Sun Yung Moon?

Chantipoo, are you a Moonie?

[kjklo]

Posted: 1/15/07 at 12:03am

Please explain how Carter was worse than Bush.
Updated On: 1/15/07 at 12:03 AM

[HDThoreau2]

Posted: 1/15/07 at 12:27am

Start with the economy. Carter presided over the worst economy in the last seventy years. He invented the misery index to defeat President Ford. When the misery index doubled during his presidency, Reagan used it to defeat Carter.

Carter gave away the Panama Canal.

Carter was emasculated by the terrorists in Iran.

Carter told us we were in a Malaise and blamed the American people for causes all of our own problems. (He still does this today)

Carter boycotted the Olympics.

And all of that is just for starters.

Today's Reagan/bush economy crushes anything that Carter could do.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 1/15/07 at 12:30am

dont you have some marigolds to sell for Rev Sun Yung Moon?

you know how Father gets when you dont meet your quota, Chantipoo

[kjklo]

Posted: 1/15/07 at 12:34am

The Panama Canal and the Olympics versus the Iraq war? Excuse me if I don't see the equivalence in terms of enduring national catastrophe.

[HDThoreau2]

Posted: 1/15/07 at 12:45am

No, like most liberals, you ignored the total picture of the failed Carter presidency.

Gas lines, a fake energy crisis, decreased military spending, and the superiority of the Soviet Union?

Why was Carter defeated in a landslide? He's an American idiot.

Poor Jimmy and Rosalyn. They just can't help it.