Jonah Goldberg:
I’ve never been a fan of Chuck Hagel. I never thought he’d make a good secretary of defense. But this line from a “senior U.S. official” is just awful:
“Make no mistake, Secretary Hagel was fired,” a senior U.S. official with close knowledge of the situation told Fox News.
This same official discounted Pentagon claims it was a mutual decision claiming President Obama has lost confidence in Hagel and that the White House had been planning to announce his exit for weeks.
“The president felt he had to fire someone. He fired the only Republican in his cabinet. Who is that going to piss off that he cares about?”
In a swipe at the resume of Hagel, who served as U.S. Army sergeant in Vietnam and received two Purple Hearts, the official added, “This is why you don’t send a sergeant to do a secretary’s job.”
What’s wrong with these people? Was the Gruber fiasco not enough? Hagel was ill-suited for the job for lots of reasons, but the fact that he was an enlisted man who served in combat wasn’t one of them.
Odd that this is the ONLY person this administration has fired. Apparently, liberal incompetence is acceptable.
Maybe Hagel should have harassed some of Obama’s political enemies to keep from getting fired.
Sen. McCain was also interviewed.
He said he had Sec. Hagel in his own office just yesterday.
The Sec. had serious concerns about the micromanagement coming from the White House (Obama).
There was a political cartoon that came to mind from last week’s Sunday Funnies (week before last?)
It recreated Teinamen Square in China where Obama was the man with the briefcases and our own military was being held up by Obama’s micromanagement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The WH is spinning furiously that this was a ”mutual decision.”
But it is pretty plain that it was not.
Now we will see what Obama’s foreign policy (more perfectly carried out) looks like as his next choice takes the helm.
While Hagel wouldn’t be my first or last choice to be SecDef, it might be safe to assume he came to the same conclusion that senior military commanders had reached long ago. When Hagel said ISIS was like no other terrorist organization seen before, it went against what Obama had and wanted to believe. The cuts into the force structure would place us back into a dangerous position in which we would be unable to respond to any kind of crisis affecting our security interests, or unnecessarily risk the lives of our military personnel to a greater degree.
Someone had to go. Hagel drew the short straw.