Mac-Coleman

I traveled today on a UN airplane from Kinshasa to Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo.  To be more precise, I left the hotel this morning at 0500, after spending late into the evening trying to get my laundry back from the hotel so I could use it on this week-long trip.  I was to retire at 2000 to get eight full hours of sleep.  I finally got to bed at 2330.  Four and one-half hours of sleep.  It took forty-five minutes to drive to the airport, another two and one-half hours processing and waiting for the flight.  Ninety minutes in the air, and then I had to wait for my rental car and driver to arrive for another two hours.  Then a forty-five minute drive into town before getting into my hotel room twelve hours after I started the day.  Traveling in a dysfunctional, failed state is exhausting, even when it is traveling in the finest accommodations available.  Kinda like taking public transportation in a large city in order to get to work.  Gotta start early and pay a lot. 

Former Senator Chuck Hagel, wounded and bemedalled VietNam combat veteran, former critic of Israel, and liberal Republican while on the Hill, will be confirmed as the new Secretary of Defense when the Senate meets to do so.  Why?  The Republicans know that a nasty fight to keep him out of the office would be too expensive a fight to enter into in terms of public opinion.  There are too many other issues that are much bigger right now.  The Republican Party hasn’t enough backing in the public arena to fight a losing battle here and also fight bigger budget and debt battle simultaneously.  I personally would fight the battle; but, I enjoy the fight for the fight’s sake. Fortunately, Secretary Hagel will probably do an acceptable job as SECDEF.  An initial comparison—a hope, rather—would be if he were to perform similarly to another liberal Republican senator chosen as SECDEF by a partisan, liberal president in 1997:  William Cohen, (R-ME).  I would not expect any more of a reach across the aisle than this anyway from the ideologue President Obama.  Let’s take it and go. 

The House of Representatives has predictably kicked the debt limit crisis can down the road just one more time.  It probably was an acceptable thing to do, given the contrived confluence of tax increases, sequestration, and the debt limit expiration at this time.  President Obama predictably has endorsed the move.  Any decision on such serious issues as this one that the president can avoid until tomorrow, he will avoid it.  The Senate predictably twiddles and sucks its thumb, happy that it doesn’t have to make a real decision either.  If I could change one thing in our government, it would be to repeal the 17^th Amendment and force senators to be accountable to state legislatures.  They thereby would act as the voice of the states, as the Founders designed them to do.  Right now, they are simply super representatives who don’t have to pass budgets and who don’t have to represent the people except for a few months every six years instead of every two.  But, I wander.  Back to the debt limit:  another contrived, media circus is gearing up for May when the debt ceiling will again be addressed.  Meanwhile, money flows unabated. 

Secretary Clinton testified today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  She took full responsibility for the Benghazi debacle.  Her words were straight forward and blunt, a disingenuous swipe at the softballs offer up by her former colleagues in the upper house.   The sad joke is that nobody will take her up on the unspoken challenge to hold her accountable for her abysmal performance.  The Benghazi debacle is over because the election is over.  The bad guys in the debacle got reelected, partly by taking the sting out of the Benghazi incident by delaying the analytic processes until after the election.  Any smack-down now of a departing SECSTATE won’t get any sympathy from the biased press and will not carry a warning to future fiddlers-while-Rome-burned in high public office.  In fact, it probably won’t hurt Ms. Clinton’s chances for winning the Democratic Party’s nomination to run for president in 2016 or for winning the election.  Two thousand sixteen is too far from now for an electorate that increasingly is made up of generations who think that all issues older than last year are so, you know, like, so last year.  Perhaps, when Secretary Clinton testifies later today in front of the House Foreign Relations Committee, someone will insist on hitting her hard.  Unfortunately, that may just give her a sympathy vote from people who will look at her only as a woman and not as an irresponsible stateswoman. 

I heard that Beyonce lip-synched the Star Spangled Banner at the inauguration festivities on Monday.  How many metaphors and puns can I tease from this slip-of-the-tongue?  The president and his friends still don’t understand what is appropriate respect at appropriate times for this great nation and its institutions.  After all, it took the president until he was running for president to learn how to stand at attention with his hand over his heart when the national anthem was being sung and Old Glory was being presented.  He deserved what he got from his friend.  The rest of us didn’t; but he did.