BULLETIN – HAGEL FIRED – AT 9:06 A.M. ET:  News sources report that Chuck Hagel has been fired as secretary of defense by President Obama.  There will be a face-saving public statement of some sort.  The White House will not describe it as a firing, but it is.  From The New York Times: 

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is stepping down under pressure, the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and a beleaguered national security team that has struggled to stay ahead of an onslaught of global crises.

The president, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks, senior administration officials said.

The officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Hagel, 68, as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ. A Republican with military experience who was skeptical about the Iraq war, Mr. Hagel came in to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestration.

But now “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus,” one administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He insisted that Mr. Hagel was not fired, saying that he initiated discussions about his future two weeks ago with the president, and that the two men mutually agreed that it was time for him to leave.

COMMENT:  Hagel was a poor, cynical choice in the first place.  A Republican who left the Senate in part because he probably would not have been renominated by his own party, his selection as secretary of defense was a poke in the eye to the opposition.

We will withhold further judgment until more details come out, and we have the name of the president's nominee to replace Chuck.  That nominee will probably face the new Republican Senate, which can veto his or her nomination, unless Harry Reid can squeeze through a confirmation process during the holiday season.

November 24, 2014