A big world, a narrow focus

By Steve Benen

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The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran raised this observation last night, doing a word count on the hearing transcript...one might be tempted to believe there are only three countries on the planet -- the United States, Israel, and Iran -- and that Iran poses some kind of existential threat to America's future.

Al Qaeda wasn't deemed important, nor was North Korea. China was brought up only a handful of times, and the use of drones wasn't mentioned at all.

In Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the next Pentagon chief, Afghanistan -- the country where American troops are fighting an active, hot war right now -- was largely treated as an afterthought.

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After yesterday, it's hard to draw any other conclusion. Yesterday wasn't about an exploration of the future of U.S. military policy, Hagel's record, the Obama administration's agenda for the next four years, the ongoing war, or the limits and scope of military force. It was about proxy fights, talking points, and scoring points...GOP members of the committee pursued Hagel with the same questions about Iran and Israel, over and over again, in the clumsiest and most ham-fisted way possible. As Rachel noted on the show last night, we saw Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) "not seeming to know very much about what she was talking about" and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) "try a sort of like cable news-style stunt against Chuck Hagel that really fell flat."

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http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/02/01/16805831-a-big-world-a-narrow-focus