Why Chuck Chuck?

I can't decide if the successful attempt to keep Susan Rice from being appointed Secretary of State was really motivated to have John Kerry get the appointment so Scott Brown could win his Senate seat in a special election - current polls show a victory from any of the likely Democratic candidates for that seat being even more unthinkable than Brownie's (noted windbag Edward Markey announced his candidacy for it) - or just an attempt to undermine President Obama that has nothing to do with Senate seats.  Because the President has floated the name of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense - he's a former U.S. Senator, with no seat to vacate, and a Republican - an the GOP has attacked him as well.  The Republicans seem to be hell-bent on Obama naming the Cabinet they want, not the Cabinet he wants. They have nothing to lose by bashing his choices, and he has everything to lose by sending his choices to the Senate in protracted, contentious nomination hearings.

Republicans don't like Hagel because he opposed the surge in Iraq and is less hawkish toward Iran than they'd like him to be. And when he was a U.S. Senator from Nebraska, he didn't make many friends.  But Democrats don't like him either.  Not only do they object to the idea of a third Republican Defense Secretary under a Democrat President since 1997, they're ticked off about homophobic comments he made in 1998 about President Clinton's gay nominee for the ambassadorship to Luxembourg, James Hormel.  Hagel said at the time at that ambassadors who represent America are "representing our lifestyle, our values, our standards. And I think it is an inhibiting factor to be gay - openly aggressively gay like Mr. Hormel - to do an effective job."

Hagel has since apologized for and disavowed those remarks.  Gay rights advocates refuse to accept his apology.  I would suggest that, before they continue to make Hagel pay for for views he's since changed his mind about, they consider this quote from a famous nineteenth-century American politician:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."

The quote is not from Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs, John C. Calhoun, or any Southern U.S. Senator from the nineteenth century.  It's from Abraham Lincoln, during one of his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858.

So, people change.  People grow.  Lincoln himself had supported colonizing freed black slaves in Africa but dropped the idea during the Civil War.  By the time Lee surrendered to Grant, Lincoln instead wanted to shoo the Confederate leaders out of the country into Canada . . . like chickens out of a pen.  His last speech ever, advocating black suffrage and, then, black citizenship - given on April 11, 1865 - was what made John Wilkes Booth decide to assassinate him. 

So Lincoln's views on race in 1865 were much more enlightened than in 1858, and even in 1858 he advocated that the black man was entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Call me crazy, but maybe we should give Chuck Hagel the same due, because a lot of people who agreed with him in opposing James Hormel's appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg now favor gay marriage and supported the lifting of the ban on gays serving openly in the military.

And one other thing . . ..  How did this country ever make as an issue who should be appointed ambassador to Luxembourg, a country smaller than the adjacent Belgian province of the same name and so small that the Rhode Island National Guard could invade and occupy it?

(P.S. The guy who made that comment about blacks being inferior has a city named for him. It's the capital of the home state of the guy who made that comment about gays not reflecting American values.)