One of the comparatively few attractive things about President Obama is his dislike of the “ritual dismissal”—the Washington practice of figuratively beheading a pre-eminent DC playa, not really because his departure will make a difference as much as the sheer pleasure involved in seeing an important somebody get his butt publicly kicked.
Well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, it seems, because SecDef Chuck Hagel just absorbed a fairly public butt kicking, very largely for the sin of being SecDef when things started to go sideways for the Obama Administration.
El Chucko was definitely not one of my fave raves, dating from his nomination hearings, when it appeared that his preferred tactic for dealing with his critics was to pretend to be too stupid to understand the questions being asked him. Chuck was laboring under the burden of having failed to place himself to the right of Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu on all questions relating to Israeli “security”, which is burden enough for any man in DC, but he certainly bore it gracelessly.
At the New York Times, Helene Cooper fills us in on all the mean things that anonymous (of course) White House staffers have to say about Chuck and, actually, I agree with some of them. It was awfully dumb of Chuck to say of ISIL that “The comprehensive threat that ISIL represents — the sophistication, the armaments, the strategic knowledge, the funding, the capacity, the ideology — it’s new. The threat is significantly worse than we’ve seen ever before, not just in Iraq, but in the Middle East.”
Those definitely were the words of an idiot, and if we fired SecDefs for talking like idiots, Chuck would deservedly be out of a job, but, as the historical record shows, SecDefs routinely talk like idiots—and that definitely includes supposed straight shooter Bob Gates, who, back in 2011, predicted that North Korea would be “targeting” the US with nuclear-tipped ICBMs by 2016, something that I predict will not happen.
But it seems that the real reason that Chuck is leaving is that 1) he’s here, and a lot of bad shit is happening, and 2) no one likes him very much. Chuck, it never hurts to sparkle.
*Voltaire, remarking in Candide on the execution of Admiral Byng, “to encourage the rest.”
