winterbadger | (no subject)

Chuck Hagel is no firebrand. I don't agree with him about everything, but he's a careful, thoughtful observer.

I don’t think that we are necessarily locked into one of two options. And that’s the way it’s presented. We are great in this country and in our politics of responding to false choices; we love false choices.

This is so very true; Americans love forcing everything into binary choices: black or white, good or bad, yes or not, enemy or ally. The world, the real world outside our effed up consciousness, is not like that.

We Americans have this frame of reference … we see a problem, there has to be a solution... Well, the kind of complicated world we live in, I’m not sure there’s a solution to everything right now. What you have to do is manage it so it doesn’t get worse, manage it toward a higher ground of solution possibilities.

It takes a smart man to see that there isn't an (immediate) solution to every question.

I like what he says about Obama too. Why do we have so few of these people left in politics? What happened to "respectfully disagree"? It's all Cleon nowadays, and far too few Pericles.