Chuck Hagel’s confirmation process has been the most depressing episode in the Republican foreign-policy debate since George W. Bush was president, not least because the debate is still constrained by terms set by John McCain and impersonators such as Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte.
Probably the most depressing aspect of this episode is the extent to which most of the new Senators aligned with Tea Party activists confirmed that they take their cues on foreign policy from more senior Republicans, all of whom endorsed the failed policies Bush administration and then learned nothing from those failures. This isn’t because it comes as a surprise that the prevailing foreign policy views among Tea Party-aligned Senators tend to be nearly as hard-line and hawkish as that of other Republican Senators. That hasn’t been news for some time. What makes this more dispiriting is that some of the Tea Party-aligned Republicans in the Senate are even more inclined to support the party’s ideological enforcement on foreign policy than many of their older colleagues.
Many of these Senators seem to be just as eager to punish even the mildest dissent against foreign entanglements and the warfare state as Bush loyalists were in the previous decade. To add insult to injury, Ted Cruz has the nerve to claim that he’s “considerably less hawkish” than his colleagues and to invoke Washington’s Farewell Address while he does it*. Cruz has evidently forgotten the part of the address in which Washington said that “nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.” If anything instructive has come out of the spectacle of the last two months, it has been the massive display of “inveterate antipathies” and “passionate attachments” for nations other than our own, as well as how thoroughly these sentiments have driven far more pressing American security issues to the margins of the discussion.
* Cruz begins speaking at approximately 59:35. Reference to Washington and foreign entanglements comes at 1:00:34.
Posted in foreign policy, politics. Tagged Ted Cruz, Jim Antle, Chuck Hagel, George Washington.
As Cruz invokes George Washington, Rand Paul uses George Kennan. It’s deeply sickening, and perhaps effective dishonesty: messaging worthy of a Frank Luntz seminar.
Ted Cruz invoking G. Washington! Encroyable!
The longer I live and the more I learn, the more love and respect I have for George Washington. For all his flaws, the best.
Many of We Tea Party Patriots never signed on for this global cop agenda which has used our American warriors as cannon fodder and tossed our American force confiscated taxpayers’ money down the rat hole.
“Many” Tea Party Patriots never signed on for this global cop agenda, Clint? Who ya got not named Paul?
And more importantly, who has the Tea Party elected who’s not on board?