Like so many other things happening in Washington DC of late, the confirmation process for Obama's SecDef nominee Chuck Hagel reflects a deep-seated Republican party hatred of anything Obamian. The continuing GOP refusal to cooperate in anything the President does, which so far as I can assess is the handiwork mainly of the Senate's senile minority leader, goes far beyond anything that could be justified on purely political grounds. It includes thwarting simple procedural steps that any patriotic citizen might suppose were essential for the good of the nation, such as confirming a head for the Department of Defense, or a functioning court system.
Much of this shameful saga is well-exposed by political observer Dana Milbank in yesterday's Washington Post. Interestingly, this piece ran in the print press with the subheading that the GOP had "lost its integrity" during the anti-Hagel orgy. Interesting, because who could possibly have thought that the GOP still had any integrity?
No need to look far for signs of dis-integritization. They're obvious in the Hagel confirmation fight, of course, but also in the earlier groundless uproar over the killing of American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya; and of course on the "sequestration" issue, where Republicans, for at least the third time, seem content to hold the country's economic well-being and international financial credit hostage to their visceral hatred of Obama.
Don't Democrats need to be prepared to compromise on some issues too? Indeed. Yet it's evident to me and I think to a lot of others that the rock-hard Republican recalcitrance toward any compromise is the greater obstacle to progress, one that caused them initially to stumble into the foolish sequester plan in fhe first place, and one that paradoxically makes it easier for Democrats to sit tight.