The Perfidious Devilspawn Yaps Again

I was just combing through our voluminous archives and came across this post about allegedly Republican Senator Charles Hagel of Nebraska and his reckless, idiotic anti-war rantings:

There's an old saying: don't imitate a moose mating call if you don't want Bullwinkel's intimate companionship. Just ask Rocky.For reasons I can only ascribe to a sheer idiocy I pray I never contract, Senator Chuck Hagel (RINO-NE) appears never to have learned that lesson - until, one likes to hope, now.Let's review, shall we?

Last week, the Nebraska senator made headlines when he criticized the Administration’s Iraq policy saying, “The White House is completely disconnected from reality... It's like they're just making it up as they go along.” Hagel also warned that Iraq was on the verge of becoming another Vietnam.

But for the sobriety and cornbelt buzzsaw accent, you'd have sworn that was Uncle Teddy going off on another brandy bender. You'd also think that "maverick" wannabes would learn that you can't out-McCain McCain - who, as it happens, is still backing the Bush Administration on the war.

But the Left doesn't care which RINO turns heel - they'll still use his wayward words anyway:

While Hagel’s comments faded from media attention, MoveOn went into action. The same day as this week’s speech by President Bush on Iraq the MoveOn PAC began a new advertising campaign calling for a withdrawal of U.S. forces. They took Hagel’s words and placed them alongside claims that President Bush, “is trying to change the subject from Iraq to terrorism and September 11-implying that Iraq attacked us in 2001.”

On Wednesday, MoveOn sent out a fundraising letter to supporters asking for $500,000 dollars to “expand the advertising into the hometowns of Republican members of Congress who will have tough elections in 2006. That will help send a signal that Congress will pay a price at the ballot box because of the Iraq failures.” The letter explains that 84% of MoveOn’s 3.3 million registered members support a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

The ad itself is titled “Hagel” and reads in part: “It’s time to come home. We went in the wrong way, let’s come home the right way.”

Anybody who is surprised by moveon's opportunism, stand on your head.

Senator Hagel would be advised to refrain from this activity, though, since it might drain all the blood out of his brain:

Hagel’s office was not pleased when they received word of the new ad. Hagel claims MoveOn used his words out of context and asked for the ad to be taken down immediately. Hagel's official statement on the ad reads in part:

"This ad is dishonest. I have never supported immediate removal of American troops from Iraq. I have said that to withdraw from Iraq now would have catastrophic consequences that would ripple across a generation of Americans, Iraqis, and the entire Middle East. I have said I believe we can succeed in Iraq. MoveOn neglects to mention that in their ad.

"I have differences with the Administration over the execution of our war policy …War is deadly serious and the debate over our policy should match the seriousness of the situation. Americans are entitled to an honest public debate about our policy in Iraq. Cheap, misleading 30-second partisan political attack ads debase our debate."

In the statement addressed to MoveOn Hagel demands that the ad be pulled down.

As if. If I were running moveon I'd be laughing in Hagel's face at his rank foolishness. They didn't "take him out of context"; what other possible context could there be to calling the President delusional and invoking the Left's favorite anti-war parallel? Nor did they trick or trap him; indeed, Hagel has been going out of his way to sound as shrilly Bushophobic as anybody across the aisle. Nobody made a sucker out of him - he braided his own noose, stuck his own neck through it, and kicked the stool out from under himself. All moveon did is snap a pic or two and otherwise enjoy watching him swing.

If Hagel truly thinks moveon's ad is "dishonest," "cheap," and "misleading," perhaps he will revisit his own dishonest, cheap, misleading rhetoric that got his words and name prominently featured in spots that will be used against Republican congressional candidates next year.

Or maybe he's just sore because his perfidy got caught in the klieg lights of public scrutiny, necessitating more "dishonest, cheap, misleading" rhetoric to try and cover his worthless ass.

If Nebraska's senior senator still harbors 2008 presidential ambitions, it would seem that it's not the President of the United States who's suffering delusions.

That was July of 2005. It's now twenty months later, Hagel's words DID contribute to GOP defeat last November, and he's evidently grown a lot more comfortable with the traitors on the other side of the aisle without having the integrity to actually cross and make it official:

Some lawmakers who complain that President Bush is flouting Congress and the public with his Iraq policies are considering impeachment an option, a Republican senator said Sunday.

Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent critic of the war, stopped short of calling for Bush's impeachment. But he made clear that some lawmakers viewed that as an option should Bush choose to push ahead despite public sentiment against the war.

"Any president who says 'I don't care' or 'I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else' or 'I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed' — if a president really believes that, then there are … ways to deal with that," Hagel said on ABC's This Week. ...

Hagel may have "stopped short" yesterday, but in at least one other venue he "went all the way":

In the April edition of Esquire magazine, Hagel described Bush as someone who didn't believe he was accountable to anyone.

"You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment," Hagel told the magazine.

Actually, no, you can't, as Cap'n Ed wryly points out. Foreign policy disagreements do not qualify as "Treason [pot, kettle, black], Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." What impeachment as Hagel floats it would amount to is an attempted coup de tat, and for it to have its intended policy effect it would have to be a blue plate special and cashier Vice President Cheney at the same time. Thus, if Hagel is truly serious about this, he is effectively pushing for the elevation of Crazy Nancy Pelosi to the presidency by illegal, extraconstitutional means to keep the big chair warm for Hillary Clinton.

The only time such a thing happened before in American history was in the summer of 1867 when a dispute over post-Civil War Reconstruction policy between President Andrew Johnson and the ruling Republican faction in Congress (the so-called "Radicals") grew so heated that the latter passed a blatantly unconstitutional law called the Tenure of Office Act. It forbade the president to fire Cabinet officers without Senate permission. Since the Radical Republicans knew that no president could tolerate such an encroachment on Executive Branch powers, it was an openly contrived excuse to remove Johnson from office once he violated the new statute, as he did when he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, an ally of the "Radicals".

The House quickly impeached Johnson, and the Senate tried and came within a single vote of toppling him from office. But it was never about the Constitution, and had everything to do with power. Johnson, just as Abraham Lincoln before him, was the lone obstacle to the "Radicals'" ambitions to rule the old Confederacy like a conquered enemy, with all the obvious implications for how the rest of the country would have been governed. America had just emerged from its worst upheavel, and was at its most vulnerable to being transformed into something the Founders never, ever intended.

That's my second significant digression, but it, too, has a point. As in 1867, the Democrats of today have the amassing of vast power in their own grubby little hands as their overarching objective. What they lack is the national upheaval to create the circumstances for such a total power grab. Bringing down the Bush Administration - literally - would help generate them. And the terrorist maelstrom that would descend upon the country from a unilateral surrender in the War Against Islamic Fundamentalism that would follow would guarantee it.

Now there's nothing remarkable about any of that; it's what the Dems have openly agitated for for years. What is stomach-turningly infuriating is that a Republican senator - and one who has the unmitigated gall to harbor presidential ambitions AS A REPUBLICAN - has become one of their prominent mouthpieces.

Chuch Hagel is not a Republican, he's a Democrat. Indeed, he's considerably to the left of his fellow Nebraskan (and Democrat) Ben Nelson, for whom I have a great deal of respect. He should join those vermin, and if he won't go willingly he should be bound, gagged, and dragged there by his tool. There's ain't no party "Big Tent" big enough to house such a backstabber, and no party can afford to maintain one and still remain coherent, cohesive, and viable.

Hagel for Lieberman. Sounds like a hellava deal. Or, even better, Hagel for Lieberman and Ben Nelson. But even just jettisoning Hagel would be worth it, a rare case of genuine addition by subtraction.