Hagel drops the I-Bomb!!!

I heard this news driving in to work this morning from "SRN" a conservative religious news service that provides feeds for Christian radio stations- I could hardly believe it. Sure, it's just one Republican Senator and he's probably running for President himself, but now that the dam has been breeched, how much longer until the flood?

"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how this goes."

The conversation beaches itself for a moment on that word -- impeachment -- spoken by a conservative Republican from a safe Senate seat in a reddish state. It's barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence, even though it flowed quite naturally out of the conversation he was having about how everybody had abandoned their responsibility to the country, and now there was a war going bad because of it.

"Congress abdicated its oversight responsibility," he says. "The press abdicated its responsibility, and the American people abdicated their responsibilities. Terror was on the minds of everyone, and nobody questioned anything, quite frankly."

He is developing, almost on the fly and without perceptible calculation, a vocabulary and a syntax through which to express the catastrophe of what followed after. Rough, and the furthest thing from glib, he's developing a voice that seems to be coming from somewhere else, distant and immediate all at once.

Listen to him calling out his fellow senators in committee.

"If you wanted a safe job," Hagel said memorably, "go sell shoes."

Read the entire article at Esquire.com