Hagel for Defense Secretary?

Not that anyone's soliciting my opinions, but this is some of the best political news I've heard in a long time. Chuck Hagel is a pragmatist, with military and political experience, that is sorely needed in the world right now...

Plus, I think he understands something about playing defense, not continually going on offense in this seeming state of permanent war. He has a realistic attitude about sovereignty.  From the previous Subsumed blog posts(scroll) mentioning Hagel:

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

But Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska broke with most of his Republican colleagues in endorsing a timetable and opposing the Cochran amendment. “There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq,” Mr. Hagel said. “There will not be a military solution to Iraq.”

“Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there,” Mr. Hagel said. “It doesn’t belong to the United States.”

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

 And, although pro-Israel sentiment runs deep in Congress, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., broke with the president on Monday and said Israel's pounding of Lebanon was hurting, not helping, America's image in the Middle East.

"The sickening slaughter on both sides must end now," Hagel said. "This madness must stop." Hagel has also been critical of the administration's Iraq policy.

Monday, July 10, 2006

by Tom Blackburn
Palm Beach Post Columnist
...
It should be added that this White House puts down Republicans when they don't sing in its Amen chorus. That would include, on the war, Sens. Graham and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. Sen. John McCain got a law against torture passed. Mr. Bush signed it along with his "finding" that the law doesn't mean what lawmakers who voted for it thought it means.

Mr. Bush's admirers like to say that he is a fan of Winston Churchill and sees himself in a similar position in his war to Mr. Churchill's in World War II. But Mr. Churchill formed a coalition with Labor Party members and worked with Josef Stalin, whose ideology Mr. Churchill abhorred, and President Roosevelt, who didn't share Mr. Churchill's regard for the British empire. As British historian Stuart Ball reminds us, some Conservatives felt that their leader wasn't doing enough for the party, and, indeed, they lost the 1945 elections. But Mr. Churchill, Mr. Ball writes, wanted "most of all to succeed as a war leader, and all else was secondary."
 

In short, for what it's worth,
I fully endorse this cross-party nomination myself, because it perhaps might take us on a new path -- a better path -- with the proper attitudes toward America's defense.

“Leaders have to adjust to the world we live in, and must have two important traits: courage and character,”
says Hagel, R-Neb