The Right's Hagel Finagle

Jen Rubin is a meta-hack, but she's a pretty reliable barometer of the winger zeitgeist, and the wingers are pretty pissed off that senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham seem to be crumbling on Chuck Hagel.

In any event, McCain and Graham shouldn’t fold when the going gets tough. If this nominee is as bad as they say, they should, and indeed must, filibuster him if the White House (unlike the Bush White House) and the Democrats (unlike the GOP senators of yesteryear) won’t do the right thing.

Here's the thing, when Susan Rice was floated for Secretary of State, Republicans readily had John Kerry's name at hand because they wanted a shot at his seat.  But have you heard Republicans mention a possible replacement for Chuck Hagel?

Not to my knowledge.  We hear how awful, incompetent, and even anti-Semitic Chuck Hagel supposedly is, but nobody seems to have a name of somebody who would be an acceptable replacement.

Funny how that works.

Criss Cross Crash

For the first time in recorded history, Mickey Kaus may actually be right about something when it comes to the leaked draft of the President's immigration bill that may end up on the table in case Senators can't come up with anything.

So what’s the purpose of this hollow threat? The only explanation I come up with is that it’s a Double Kabuki play: 1) The President gets to posture as the tough guy demanding a deal (or else he’ll unleash his draft!). Meanwhile the Hispanic caucus and the amnesty lobby can gnaw on all the pro-illegal statutory tweaks they would like to see in the “path to citizenship,” etc.  But more important 2) Republicans like Rubio and Paul Ryan get to posture by denouncing the President’s draft (Rubio: “Dead on Arrival” Ryan: “the wrong direction”) thereby earning themselves seeming-tough-on-illegals street cred that might serve them well when they sell out by endorsing an instant-legalization compromise  (as, in fact, Rubio has already done).

That would not only explain why the plan exists but why it was leaked by “an Obama administration official” to USA Today. Obama wants to give Rubio and Ryan the opportunity to look like they are fighting him. But it’s a fake fight.

Got a better explanation?

Actually I think Kaus is correct in his own paranoid way.  I agree that the plan was leaked to USA Today in order to give Republicans something to publicly beat up on for a while, but the reality is immigration has to pass, or the GOP will take the blame for killing it, and that means the Dems will continue to get the vast majority of the growing Latino vote forever.  Dubya may have been a meathead, but even he was smart enough to listen to Rove and Cheney on this.  The problem is that he underestimated the bigoted monster he helped to create, and it turned on him.

That monster still rampages around the Republican countryside, and the last few Republicans left to be motivated by enlightened self-interest are trying to slay it.

I think it will fail.  The Republican Party is a hate group in 2013, period.  They will have to be reconstituted at some point in the future, but they are effectively done right now.

StupidiNews!

• Country music star Mindy McCready is dead at the age of 37, found at her Arkansas home on Sunday with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
• Journalists at the BBC are on a 24-hour strike in protest of "compulsory redundancy" measures used to terminate 30 employees.
• Members of the Lumbee Indian tribe of North Carolina say they will continue to use eagle feathers in tribal ceremonies even if the tribe is not federally recognized to be able to do so.
• Danica Patrick is the first woman to qualify for a pole position in a NASCAR Sprint Cup race, putting in the fastest time for next week's Daytona 500.
• A laser intended for measuring carbon samples on Mars is being used by the EU to detect counterfeit honey smuggled from China.