"I believe President Obama's primary motivation in nominating Hagel is ... not to poke a finger in the eye of the pro-Israel constituency."
Au Contraire my friend. Obama deeply resents having been acajoled and coerced, mainly by Schumer, to have to fake some nominal support for Israel during the campaign, and the payback for this, in his petty, imperialist mind, is the Hagel nomination. The entire objective of the nomination was to demonstrate the utter contempt he has for the Jews who voted for him. And now he's going to force Schumer the Jew to eat the nomination and like it. Unfortunately Schumer is so bought in to Obama at this point that he can't turn around and get out even if he wanted to.
It should be interesting, the confirmation hearings on the nomination of Charles Hagel to be the next secretary of defense of the United States.
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A lot more interesting than the hearings on John Kerry's nomination as secretary of state or John Brennan's nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. There may have been a time when those nominations were supposed to be controversial, but compared to the choice of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, both look like cinches to sail through the confirmation process.
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Mr. Hagel's qualifications to head the...
It also shows the shallowness / lunacy of the "you're an anti-semite" crowd. When they replay Hagel's quote about how he represents the US as 'proof' of his racism, most Americans will hear a message they welcome.