Through the Looking Glass

It's a crazy world, isn't it? A Republican senator with a 96% positive rating from the American Conservative Union is challenging his own president on the war in Iraq while the leading Democrats are still talking fuzzy about the war, despite the sound thrashing the Dems gave their opponents last November, with the war itself as the main issue in those victories.

Chuck Hagel, Vietnam veteran and current senator from Nebraska, has been a long-time vocal opponent of the Iraq debacle, stemming from his realization that he had, along with a lot of his fellow vets, been duped by then-president Johnson over the reasons for and the conduct of the Vietnam War. He's been asking the tough questions and demanding the answers from the BFEE Maladminstration for a long time now, and he can't be ignored.

It's even gotten to the point that longtime leftist journalist Robert Scheer has come out and said that given a choice between Hagel and one of the wishy-washy namby-pamby mealy-mouth squishy-on-the-war Democrats, he'll support Hagel.

And that, IMHO, would be a huge mistake. Hagel, for all his aw-shucks charm and flatland charisma, is still more conservative than even McCain, and there's no reason to think he wouldn't, to take just one example, appoint more Scalia-Thomas-Alito clones to the Supreme Court.

Op Ed News has a lengthy but compelling analysis of Hagel and his maybe White House run. It's worth a read.