(painting of President Dwight Eisenhower by Mike Hagel; hanging in Senator Chuck Hagel’s private Senate office) Before he departs the Senate 16 months from now, Senator Chuck Hagel will have many opportunities to focus a national spotlight on the gaps in the foreign policy and national security course the country is on.
Chuck Hagel is standing down, something this blog highlighted a few days ago. I think that as things look at the moment, the next president is likely to be a Democrat — but the country still will be deeply divided.
Iowans have the privilege and responsibility of field testing presidential candidates and in return, they command an attention in our national policy debates that at times allows them to squeeze out a few goodies, such as ethanol subsidies, despite their inefficiencies.
(Civil rights attorney Leonard Weinglass) All I’d need to write here is Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or Haditha to make the case that America has lost its moral credibility in much of the world. It’s tough to make a case against other thugs in the world when we deploy unaccountable thuggery of our own.
Senator John Ensign just proposed a major cut to U.S. contributions to UN peacekeeping on the Senate floor. Just last month, with strong U.S. support, the UN Security Council authorized a peacekeeping mission to Darfur. It’s the largest, most expensive mission ever, and it’s coming together now in a very promising way.
J.J. Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Forward, says I misinterpreted the editorial he wrote on Israel, the American Jewish community, and the Armenian genocide in my post last week. The writers and editors at The Forward are a very bright and thoughtful bunch, and I value their contributions to the public debate highly.
In mid-August, I was flying off to participate in the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. I was catching an 8 am flight at Dulles Airport and for whatever reason was being escorted to the front of some very long security lines and was given the red carpet treatment by TSA. I have no idea why.
I think I’m going to initiate a new regular feature at The Washington Note called “Over the Line.” This will just be stuff that goes a notch or ten too far. Some funny. Some tragic. I have three items today.
Jon Corzine ended up being the butt of a couple of jokes today at the ground-breaking event for the new Giants and Jets football stadium.
At about 12:40 pm today EST, I will be doing an interview on NPR’s new “Bryant Park Project” show on the subject of the APEC leaders meeting in Australia.
