Maddow slams Hagel, to neocon applause

by on December 22, 2012 37
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The war against Chuck Hagel to be Defense Secretary continues. Rachel Maddow concludes this short segment, “Sorry, Charlie” on Chuck Hagel’s homophobic comment of 14 years ago  with the statement, “I do not know if President Obama wants to nominate Chuck Hagel or not. But if he is, so far it’s not going all that well.”

Hagel has apologized for the statement.

“My comments 14 years ago in 1998 were insensitive,” he said, NBC News reported. “They do not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights.”

But Maddow picked up a Washington Post item saying that the object of the 1998 slur, James Hormel, does not accept Hagel’s apology.

Notes a friend: Dan Senor is retweeting the criticism of Hagel. This gives the lobby the cover they need. Remember after they sank Chas Freeman they claimed it was all about China and Saudi Arabia. They need a smokescreen to say it wasn’t all about Israel. 

Andrew Sullivan has characterized this as a “classic” underhanded smear campaign, and pointed out that Hagel voted in 2006 to oppose a ban on same-sex marriage:

A secretary of defense nominee should not be disqualified because he said something retrograde on a non-defense issue fifteen years ago. In the most dangerous scenario gay activists have faced – a potential constitutional amendment to consign us permanently to second class status – Hagel voted no.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Israel/Palestine

{ 37 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Ramzi Jaber says:
    December 22, 2012 at 1:29 pm

    no longer watching maddow. she’s doing the bidding of the israeli likud right-wing zionist christian nuts lobby……….. who incidentally is TOTALLY against gays. wake up rachel. very disappointed. truly a classic liberal except on palestine and the freedom and human rights of palestinians. sad. sad. sad.

    • MRW says:
      December 22, 2012 at 6:04 pm

      Maddow has a new multi-million dollar apartment or loft in lower Manhattan; moved her girlfriend in from MA. She has a big monthly nut to protect, just like Hannity and O’Reilly and the rest of the broadcasters. Reagan’s 1985 deregulation of the media created the six media behemoths and the huge salaries. That has contributed to anchor-fear more than anything else.

      EDIT: I remember one telling me he had a $50,000 monthly nut years ago: mortgage, private schools for three kids, summers in the Hamptons, his wife’s clothing allowance and city/state/fed taxes. He said he was ‘getting by’.

    • tree says:
      December 23, 2012 at 1:59 am

      Steve Clemons has a defense of Hagel up at The Atlantic. Seems that Clemons, openly gay, has been a friend of Hagel’s for years.

      Again, I am a big fan of HRC and Chad Griffin. I have gone to the last couple of HRC dinners as the guest of the managing partner of the mega-law firm Paul Hastings — a straight and happily married Republican who supported Mitt Romney but is steadfastly committed to human rights and to LGBT equality. Paul Hastings is the major underwriter of the HRC dinner, and I hope that Chad Griffin or the firm invite Hagel and his wife to sit at their table and have a conversation on these issues.

      Had Hagel been invited he would have told the audience that he valued each and every man and woman who chose to serve this nation, on the battlefield and in other capacities — regardless of his or her ethnic background, sexual identity, or religion. I’m not sure where Hagel stands on same-sex marriage, but I know that he supports solid legal protections for gay families and is personally supportive of gays and lesbians.

      How do I know this? Because I’m a national-security wonk who happens to be gay and who happens to have interacted with and followed Chuck Hagel for years. I have spoken directly about these issues with him over the years — once for more than an hour by phone from the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs.

      I wrote about this experience for The Washington Note, reflecting on how my partner and I early in our relationship had stumbled into a New Year’s Eve travel package that placed us amidst 1,000 straight couples celebrating there. Each couple got a top hat and tiara … we needed two top hats. No dice. We quickly escaped the dinner and went into a lounge with a fantastic, black jazz-singing diva who invited us to sit in the front. Then, to my surprise as I didn’t really know him well, White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty and his wife hung out with us, loving the jazz, and were more embracing and warm to both of us than I had ever experienced in a straight crowd.

      It just so happened I was invited about 18 years after that night to speak at the World Affairs Council of Colorado Springs — and staying at the Broadmoor again brought back those memories. The hotel was packed with evangelicals there for a massive Bible-study exercise. That night Hagel and I spoke by phone at length about the wars, about his concerns for the country and for soldiers and their plight. We talked about his interaction with the administration. And we talked about my memories of that night at the Broadmoor nearly two decades earlier, and my own hope that don’t ask, don’t tell would end. I told him how I thought that the ongoing purges against gay translators, particularly gay Muslim translators, working on national-intelligence cables was outrageous.

      We talked about this stuff. At some point, Hagel may have been a supporter of don’t ask, don’t tell, but as of a couple of years ago he was not. He believed that we owed more to those who were climbing up hill to fight for this nation, who were climbing up a hill to be fairly and legally committed to the ones they loved, who were climbing up a hill to be treated fairly at work and to raise children in a loving and accepting environment.

      This is the Chuck Hagel I have come to know and have respected for so many years.

      link to theatlantic.com

  2. American says:
    December 22, 2012 at 2:07 pm

    Well now we know who owns Maddow …as if there was any doubt.

    I cannot tell you the idiotic slanderous things I have seen the Pro Israel cretins on the net making..like this one at politico…

    “Enki

    Reply #19
    Dec. 21, 2012 – 2:12 AM EST
    Hagel comes from a family with bad tempers and alcoholism. Is he a stable personality? President Obama will be stirring racism and anti-Jewish bigotry if he goes through with what will be a contentious Senate confirmation hearing. Any time the President has to say “Don’t worry, I’ll be making the decisions” you know he has conceded the argument”

    link to politico.com

    • Kathleen says:
      January 17, 2013 at 7:48 am

      I has been obvious from the beginning of Rachel Maddow’s very public career where she stands on the I/P conflict and her support for a strike on Iran. She never reports about the conflict and has on many occasions repeated the unsubstantiated claims about Iran. One human rights she is clearly very selective. If all of the Palestinians were gay she would be all over this very serious human rights issue.

      Will give her that at one point she had former President Jimmy Carter on and of course he stated the facts on the ground in the I/P conflict right on her program. So this was a welcome opening

  3. HarryLaw says:
    December 22, 2012 at 2:17 pm

    President Obama Said last year that “Manning broke the law” this so called constitutional lawyer did not care that Manning has not been tried or convicted for any crime, I don’t recall that he apologized for that remark, that a so called progressive Maddow can bring up something 14 years ago for which Hagel has already apologized tells you all you need to know about her.

  4. Les says:
    December 22, 2012 at 2:26 pm

    Like the Times, Maddow is afraid to mention the opposition of the Israel Lobby. Imagine a media that is 100% under the thumb.

  5. American says:
    December 22, 2012 at 2:31 pm

    Are Alarm bells going off somewhere in the gov or the parts of the establishment?
    I have to think there are some people or some group somewhere that is doing some pressuring of their own for the Lobby and Israel to be mentioned on msm, even a little, after 65 years of ironed handed enforced silence and slant on it.

    This am on msnbc Up With Chris ,Greenwald and Arrron Miller were on discussing Hagel and the smears…..it was “lite” on the Lobby but did talk about it.
    Discussion of Israel and the Lobby is inching out in ‘some of’ the media bit by bit.
    This would not have been allowed a year ago. The closest any msm has gotten to the Israel issue was Fox reporting on the “dancing Israelis” cheering the fall of the WTT and Chris Matthews mentioning the Israel neocons right after 911…..once…and never mentioning it again.
    It’s not a lot but even the little that is being said tells me some people some where are fed up and applying some pressure on the msm. The cable execs aren’t allowing this leak on Israel out of their (non existent) concern for the US, that’s for sure. Of course behind the execs that run the network are a lot of big stockholders who actually ‘own it’ —so it’s possible some or one of them has had an attack of patriotism.

    You can see the msnbc clips here:

    link to guardian.co.uk

    • Annie Robbins says:
      December 22, 2012 at 2:45 pm

      You can see the msnbc clips here:

      or here (!):

      link to mondoweiss.net

      • American says:
        December 22, 2012 at 2:56 pm

        Did you already have this up?…..I must be getting blind, didn’t see it.

        • Annie Robbins says:
          December 22, 2012 at 3:03 pm

          only for at least 30 seconds American. but i’ve been working on it for a few hrs. one of the blockquotes by greenwald, he talks so fast (which i do too, and as a listener i appreciate because he crams in lots of info in his brief timespace) and it makes it very time consuming to quote him accurately. i couldn’t find the transcript so i had to keep backing up the tape (at least 15 times) to get each word right. anyway, i thought it would be a breeze, sometimes they are. but there were so many awesome quotes in that one segment i wanted to highlight them. there was one by ackerman i had half ready in another segment,and another by jordan i would have loved to put in. but after a few hrs i had to cut it loose.

  6. seanmcbride says:
    December 22, 2012 at 2:50 pm

    Rachel Maddow becomes creepier with each passing year — self-righteous, shrill, cowardly in terms of the safe targets she chooses to wail away on, and an intellectual lightweight — not nearly as bright as she thinks she is. She would be chewed up on Mondoweiss in just a few exchanges. There is no there there.

    • American says:
      December 22, 2012 at 3:02 pm

      She is creepy, my wife said Maddow reminds her of those type of women whose main activity is running a neighborhood gossip vine about all the other people who won’t join them in their dirt digging.

    • Donald says:
      December 22, 2012 at 11:46 pm

      She’s wildly overrated. Quite apart from the I/P issue, where she is disgusting, I’ve never understood what people see in her, but many liberals, including two that I know in real life, think highly of her. I don’t watch her regularly, but I’ve seen her show enough times to find this baffling or disheartening or both.
      Comparing her show to that of Chris Hayes on almost any subject and the difference in intellectual level is glaringly obvious.

      (Chris Hayes, btw, flatters her, but I think that’s because they’re on the same network and he may owe his start on TV to her to some degree.)

      • Shingo says:
        December 23, 2012 at 8:53 am

        She is a pretty talented and intelligent commenter Donald. Some of her scathing critiques about Obama’s policies have been outstanding – even Glenn Greenwald, who has criticised her for some of her arguments has described her orations as superb on some issues.

  7. chris_k says:
    December 22, 2012 at 3:04 pm

    I am repeating myself, but if Obama wanted to pick Hagel, he should have just picked Hagel and let the Lobby duke it out at confirmation, in which Hagel’s Senate tenure would be advantageous. I’ve seen Obama play this game for four years. The rank and file, Gentile and Jewish, that wants something done for the suffering of the Palestinians (and US autonomy) are given the notion, “well he wanted Hagel but the political laws of gravity came into play, Obama has to play politics.” I would be shocked if Obama picks him now. Whether he does is a good indication of whether he gets anything done on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My guess he doesn’t, and he gets nothing done on the I-P conflict in four years.

  8. Sandy M says:
    December 22, 2012 at 3:26 pm

    In this December 2010 clip from the Letterman show, Maddow criticizes Julian Assange for being an “information anarchist.” At 3:00 on the time stamp she says that Americans should have access to information about what their government is doing but that “freelancers … random Australians” shouldn’t decide which documents we have access to.

    link to youtube.com

  9. DICKERSON3870 says:
    December 22, 2012 at 3:42 pm

    RE: “Hagel has apologized for the statement. ‘My comments 14 years ago in 1998 were insensitive,’ he said, NBC News reported. ‘They do not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights.” ~ Weiss

    MY COMMENT/QUESTION/ANSWER: Some of the Neoconservative women have said far more reprehensible things about gays. When will they apologize? (ANSWER: Neocons never, ever apologize for anything!)

    SEE: “Rachel Podhoretz Decter Abrams’s Gay Problem — And Ours, by Daniel Luban, LobeLog.com, 7/13/10

    [EXCERPTS] Eli and Ali have been doing great reporting on the Emergency Committee for Israel, the new Likudnik group that has formed to attack Democrats on Israel. Many of the group’s principals will be familiar — Bill Kristol, of course, needs no introduction . . .
    . . . One figure who has received less attention is the group’s fourth principal, Rachel Abrams — wife of Elliott Abrams, daughter of Midge Decter, stepdaughter of Norman Podhoretz.     This is a shame, because she is almost certainly the craziest of the lot.
    I must confess that when I began reading her blog, I was primarily looking for evidence of her Revisionist Zionism. And, to be sure, such evidence is not in short supply. . .
    . . . But as I continued reading Rachel Abrams’s writings, what jumped out at me was not so much her predictably crazy views about Israel, but her strange obsession with (and apparent hostility to) homosexuality. This first jumped out at me in her response to Peter Beinart’s New York Review of Books essay, a long rant in which Abrams pretends to write in Beinart’s voice. While most of her Beinart “parody” is devoted to accusations that he is insufficiently devoted to the state of Israel, a large chunk of it is spent on rather bizarre and gratuitous insinuations that Beinart is gay. Thus she has fake-Beinart complaining, about a focus group of Jewish students, that “an insufficient number were gay and too many were broads,” and espousing his support for “open debate that of course excludes those who would advance anti-feminist or anti-gay or pro-Israel argument”. (It’s striking that she equates “pro-Israel” with “anti-feminist” and “anti-gay” arguments.) Then she has fake-Beinart condemning Orthodox Jews for homophobia before defensively reasserting his own heterosexuality: “they condemn gays, though I want to reassert that I have children,” a trope that she repeats throughout the piece. One has to wonder why she is so intent to insist that Beinart is gay, as if this fact would have any relevance whatsoever to the content of his piece.
    I was initially inclined to dismiss Abrams’s homophobic attack on Beinart as simply a failed and sophomoric attempt at humor, but the more of her writing I read, the more I noticed that this strange obsession with homosexuality seems to be a recurring feature of it. For instance, in a post claiming that Christopher Hitchens is “giving homosexuality a bad name,” and professing disinterest in the sexual pasts of “old Tory buggers,” Abrams writes:
    Wherever one stands on the homosexuality question—I’m agnostic, or would be if the “gay community” would quit trying to shove legislation down my throat—there can be no denying bisexuality’s double betrayal—you never know, whether you’re the man of the hour or the woman . . .

    . . . Similarly, Abrams is deeply offended by the Obama administrations’ human rights policy, but her complaint goes beyond the standard neocon one that Obama is not aggressive enough in pushing regime change against Israel’s rivals — what’s really galling is that the administration has identified LGBT rights in the U.S. as an important human rights issue. She froths that it’s Hillary “Clinton’s fawning speech in honor of ‘Pride Month,’ which she delivered the other day to members of the ‘LGBT community’ who have fanned out from the mother-ship of state, as it were…that’s the truly breathtaking expression of this perversion of a policy.” For telling this quote-unquote community such wildly controversial statements as “human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights,” Clinton is responsible for this “perversion” — I can’t imagine the word choice is accidental — of a policy.
    I could go on. There’s her speculation, for instance, that the problems of the Afghan war originate in the rampant homosexuality of Pashtun males, which leads Abrams onto a long tangent about homosexuality among the ancient Greeks, concluding: “those ancient elitist pedophiles and narcissists, disturbingly fascinating as they are, will seem to many in our armed forces to have been people doing and suffering things that are very ‘base’ indeed.” There’s yet another rant about the Obama administration’s focus on LGBT rights, which she excoriates as an abandonment of America’s traditional “embracing of the rights of ordinary men and women,” (as opposed to perverts, presumably). There’s the way that Abrams throws a gratuitous warning about “a profitable surge in gay-couples-therapy sessions, as gay marriage, and divorce, become commonplace—nay, even humdrum” into an article on a completely unrelated topic. But you get the picture. . .

    ENTIRE COMMENTARY – link to lobelog.com

    • DICKERSON3870 says:
      December 22, 2012 at 3:56 pm

      RE: “Neocons never, ever apologize for anything!” – me (above)

      FOR INSTANCE, I DO NOT BELIEVE JENIFER RUBIN HAS EVER APOLOGIZED FOR FANNING THE FLAMES OF ANTI-SEMITISM AT THIS CUFI “SUMMIT”: “Inside CUFI’s 2011 Washington ‘Summit’”, Special to JewsOnFirst.org, 07/29/11
      Our eyewitness report on Christians United For Israel’s annual Washington conference

      (excerpt)Inside CUFI’s 2011 Washington “Summit”, Special to JewsOnFirst.org, July 29, 2011
      Our eyewitness report on Christians United For Israel’s annual Washington conference
      [EXCERPT] . . . And this is the rub – Christian Zionists love the idea of Jews – not Jews as they actually are, but as representatives of God’s ongoing truth and impending Christian salvation. They love religious Jews who, through the conflation of American and Israeli identities, many seem to think of as sharing the exact same values as them, minus Jesus. Whether it is CUFI on Campus students excitedly Tweeting “there are so many Jews here!” or women fawning over their new Star of David necklaces and sharing stories of possible Jewish lineage, it seems that actual interaction with Jews of diverse opinions is significantly lacking. So while conversion attempts are waning (some attendees expressed the idea that God is creating “one new man” with Christians and Jews as they are) there is still a need for conversion to the political philosophy of Christian Zionists.
      And this is where those Jews who are strong supporters of CUFI come in handy. They can criticize Jews to a far greater degree than any Christian Zionists would be willing to do.       Conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin [of the “Washington (Neocon) Post”) spent a great deal of her talk slamming her co-religionists for being naively liberal, and referencing her fellow panelist’s father’s book – Norman Podhoretz’s “Why are Jews Liberal?” – as a way to try and explain that they have fallen away from God and been captivated by the “religion of liberalism” to which the audience expressed considerable dismay. Rubin and others are useful for this kind of criticism because it allows them to express contempt for their fellow Jews, which coming out of the mouth of anyone else would, quite rightly, be considered anti-Semitism. . .

      ENTIRE REPORT – link to jewsonfirst.org

    • DICKERSON3870 says:
      December 22, 2012 at 4:25 pm

      ALSO RE: “Neocons never, ever apologize for anything!” – me (above)

      SEE: “Are you stupid enough to be a blogger for the Washington Post? Take the Norway test, by Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss, 7/23/11
      [EXCERPTS] Amazing. Neoconservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin blames the Norwegian horror on jihadists, and Jim Fallows nails her. Rubin:

      We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra.

      She says we need to keep funding the war on terror and drags Gary Schmitt of American Enterprise Institute into it. He says:

      “But as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating. No doubt cutting the head off a snake is important; the problem is, we’re dealing with global nest of snakes.”

      Fallows:

      Seven Seventeen hours after the Post item went up, six sixteen hours after its claims were shown to be false and hysterical, it’s still there, with no correction or apology.

      Steve Clemons also weighs in on Rubin’s “fearmongering.”

      Perhaps you should link the extremist violence from right wing fanatics, Christian religious zealots within our countries — within the US, within Norway, and elsewhere — to your pet causes. Would at least be more technically correct.

      SOURCE – link to mondoweiss.net

      ● ALSO SEE: One Wrong Turn After Another – link to sadlyno.com

      • DICKERSON3870 says:
        December 22, 2012 at 4:38 pm

        P.S. ALSO RE: “Neocons never, ever apologize for anything!” – me (above)

        MORE OF AN EXCUSE THAN AN APOLOGY: “To Post Ombud, Critics of ‘Muslims Did It’ Blogger Are the Real Monsters”, by Peter Hart, FAIR Blog, 08/01/11

        [EXCERPTS] ‘Washington Post’ ombud Patrick Pexton weighed in yesterday [7/31/11] on the criticisms of right-wing Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. She was among a handful of media personalities who declared the Norway terror attacks to be the work of Muslim jihadists. . .
        . . . In discussing why Rubin didn’t modify her post after the news that the suspect Anders Breivik was not a Muslim terrorist at all, Pexton explains:
        Rubin has a good defense. She is Jewish. She generally observes the Sabbath from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday; she doesn’t blog, doesn’t tweet, doesn’t respond to reader e-mails.

        OK. But then it’s hard to fathom what she wrote when she did check in– one of the only criticisms Pexton seems to think is legitimate:

        When she went online at 8 p.m. Saturday, her mea culpa post on Norway was the first thing she posted, although its tone also hurt her, particularly this sentence, which struck many readers as borderline racist: “There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.”

        Pexton goes on [and] offers some mush about the ideological divide . . .

        ENTIRE COMMENTARY – link to commondreams.org

      • DICKERSON3870 says:
        December 22, 2012 at 4:55 pm

        ALSO RE: “Neocons never, ever apologize for anything!” – me (above)

        FOR INSTANCE, I DO NOT BELIEVE JENIFER RUBIN HAS EVER APOLOGIZED FOR THIS: “[O]ne is tempted to advise a great many generals and admirals to hush up and fight.” ~ Jennifer Rubin, 2011

        SEE: “Ongoing disgrace: ‘Washington Post’ neocon columnist tells U.S. generals to ‘hush up [about Palestine] and fight’”, by Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss, 2/09/11

        Yesterday the ‘Jerusalem Post’ reported that in Israel, former National security adviser General Jim Jones said that Israel/Palestine is the heart of the problem in the Middle East. That’s the linkage idea.
        “I’m of the belief that had God appeared in front of President Obama in 2009 and said if he could do one thing on the face of the planet, and one thing only, to make the world a better place and give people more hope and opportunity for the future, I would venture that it would have something to do with finding the two-state solution to the Middle East.”

        Speaking to reporters after addressing the conference, Jones said Israel’s dispute with the Palestinians was the “knot that is at the center of mass.”
        Jennifer Rubin, the neoconservative blogger at the ‘Washington Post’, writes: Nevertheless, to American ears at the conference the recitation of the mantra that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the region’s central problem seemed decidedly off-key when Egypt is suffering an eruption, Tunisia has thrown off the shackles of its despot and Iran is on the offense in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere. It also puts Gen. David Petraeus’s comments along the same lines in context. One suspects that the upper echelons of the military are steeped in the brew of “Israel is the key to the region’s problems” conventional wisdom. In that regard, one is tempted to advise a great many generals and admirals to hush up and fight.

        SOURCE – link to mondoweiss.net

        ● ALSO SEE: Ah, Jennifer Rubin. Sweet, precious, Jennifer Rubin – link to sadlyno.com

        • DICKERSON3870 says:
          December 22, 2012 at 5:08 pm

          RE: “[O]ne is tempted to advise a great many generals and admirals to hush up and fight.” ~ chickenhawk Jennifer Rubin, 2011

          MY COMMENT: ¡Muy Macho!

          AN EARLY WINTER EVENING’S MUSICAL INTERLUDE, sponsored by the makers of new Ziocaine Über-Xtreme®: It’s guaran-damn-teed to blow your effing mind!™

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          Possess the strength and confidence, life’s a steal,
          You can best believe that [s]he’s a macho [wo]man
          [S]He’s a special person in anybody’s land.
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          ● “Macho Man” Randy Savage (VIDEO, 04:55) – link to youtube.com
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          ● In the Navy (VIDEO, 04:02) – link to youtube.com

          P.S. If the Village People are ever revived, a “butch” Neocon (male or female) should be added! [Perhaps modeled after Marty Peretz or Gertrude Himmelfarb!]

  10. radii says:
    December 22, 2012 at 4:16 pm

    maybe ExiledOnline or their S.H.A.M.E. project can find out what stranglehold the lobby has on Rachel Maddow because they sure seem to have her

  11. DICKERSON3870 says:
    December 22, 2012 at 5:34 pm

    RE: “Maddow slams Hagel, to neocon applause”

    ● RELEVANT PETITION: Urging the Obama administration to nominate Hagel and fight for his confirmation.
    TO SIGN - link to petitions.whitehouse.gov

    ● RELEVANT FACEBOOK PAGE: Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense
    TO “LIKE” – link to facebook.com

  12. MRW says:
    December 22, 2012 at 6:02 pm

    The majority of the House and Senate were anti-gay publicly in 1998. Where’s she been?

    • biorabbi says:
      December 23, 2012 at 12:06 am

      I agree. But they were not as spiteful as Hagel’s comment on Hormel. But I agree the fact he didn’t much like gays 14 years ago was a position shared by most Americans, especially of his generation. There has been a sea change in opinion in this country toward homosexuals. For the good.

      Less important than the Jew lobby/aggressively, openly gay thing is his staff turnover every two weeks due to salty language. Hagel would be in a better position for Obama in a chief of staff type position or behind the scenes advisor to the President as opposed to running an increasingly politically correct intercine environment at defense.

      If the purpose of Hagel is to send a message to Bibi, why not just appoint him as the new chief of staff/counselor to the President, a non-appointment position but with great importance. Let some more PC types like Kerry be the public face ect… Just a ghought for those who want to hate on Israel.

      • Annie Robbins says:
        December 23, 2012 at 12:34 am

        If the purpose of Hagel is to send a message to Bibi,

        huh? you think obama would build his cabinet around him? the purpose of hagel is probably because they likes and trusts him. it’s his second term, he can do that sort of thing. maybe they see eye to eye. the last thing obama should do is plan his cabinet around what an israeli politician thinks, one way or the other.

        why not just appoint him as the new chief of staff/counselor to the President, a non-appointment position but with great importance. Let some more PC types like Kerry be the public face ect

        obviously obama could care less about face, or he never would have considered nominating rice, who’s demeanor is akin to a barking dog.

        • biorabbi says:
          December 23, 2012 at 2:43 am

          I never understood the anger at Rice… from the left or right. Barking dog? She seems tough. I’m not a feminist, but why is ok for Hagel to be viewed as a tough SOB to work for, using salty language, but you have a lady like Hillary or Rice and there barking dogs. Annie, my point is not really at you but at our society. A woman has to be sweet and smart, but a guy, not so much.

          As for Hagel, if your thesis is correct, why allow more time for Hagel’s detractors to attack him, while nominating Kerry before Xmas. My point is Obama is having persuading his own democrats on Hagel, let alone the Republicans. I think many republicans will vote against him, perhaps a large majority due to payback on the Iraq question(ie McCain, Graham et al)

          So, if Obama could care less about face, why didn’t he make the announcement when he nominated Kerry?

      • Mooser says:
        December 23, 2012 at 12:26 pm

        “But I agree the fact he didn’t much like gays 14 years ago was a position shared by most Americans, especially of his generation”

        Biorabbi, I’m gl;ad you’re not a pharmicist, you can’t do arithmetic. 14 years agoi was like, uh, 1999. Were you hating on gays in 1999?

      • seafoid says:
        December 24, 2012 at 2:31 am

        “There has been a sea change in opinion in this country toward homosexuals. For the good”

        there will also be a sea change in attitudes to Jewish power. For the good.

  13. doug says:
    December 22, 2012 at 7:04 pm

    Hormel accepts Hagel’s apology!

    Not that Maddow will mention it.

    link to gaystarnews.com

  14. Robert Naiman says:
    December 23, 2012 at 4:40 pm

    Key things for people to know:

    1) Hormel accepted Hagel’s apology:
    Hormel uses Facebook to accept Hagel’s apology
    link to gaystarnews.com
    2) Human Rights Campaign welcomed Hagel’s apology:

    link to washingtonpost.com
    3) Prominent foreign policy analyst Steve Clemons, an openly gay man who has known Hagel closely for years, posted this very strong defense:
    The Chuck Hagel I Know: A Staunch Defender of Gay Rights
    link to huffingtonpost.com
    4) There is a petition in support of Hagel’s nomination at MoveOn here:
    Back Obama in Tapping Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense
    link to signon.org

  15. seafoid says:
    December 24, 2012 at 2:16 am

    Dan Senor is a turd. Maddow likes her career. She knows who butters her bread. At the going down of the zionist sun they will be remembered.

  16. seafoid says:
    December 24, 2012 at 2:36 am

    The whole story is absurd. Interviews for the post of World’s second most important sociopath – job involves organising mass murder. Can you kill with a clean conscience? But god forbid if you are homophobic. As if the drones just kill heteros . LOL

    What difference does it make to next week’s Pakistani dead if the great white Satan in DC admires the lifestyle choices of the twink community ?

    Will the veterans thinking of committing suicide tomorrow stop and think about how important it is that Hagel or whoever is sound on the GLBT question?

    And is there anything more cynical than using gay rights in the service of empire?

    • Annie Robbins says:
      December 24, 2012 at 3:25 am

      is there anything more cynical than using gay rights in the service of empire?

      what else is pinkwashing? they will use anything to divert from having hagel’s demise land on their laps. they want him gone, and the farther away from israel they paint the blame, the better. lieberman, it’s iran. gays fine. but strip all that away we know what this is about. and it will be flushed if he gets nominated. they’d rather cut it off before it comes to that. but we all know what this is about.