Tomgram: Nick Turse, Chuck Hagel, and Murder in Vietnam!

After TD Managing Editor Nick Turse appeared on Fresh Air Monday, his new book on the Vietnam War, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, rose to #48 at Amazon. Congrats, Nick! Our offer of a signed, personalized copy of the book in return for a $100 donation to this site has had a remarkable and heartening response. We can't thank those of you who contributed enough! The offer remains open. Just check it out at our donation page. If you want to know more about the book itself, make sure to read Jonathan Shell's "How Did the Gates of Hell Open in Vietnam?" Think of it as the Great Obama Shuffle. When UN ambassador Susan Rice went down in flames as the president's nominee for secretary of state, he turned to ally, former presidential candidate and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry, who had essentially been traveling the world as a second secretary of state during Obama's first term. Next, he nominated his counter-terrorism "tsar" and right hand man in the White House-directed drone wars to be the next head of the CIA, which dominates those drone wars. Then, he picked White House chief of staff, and former Citigroup executive Jack Lew, to head the Treasury Department. Meanwhile, he tapped his key foreign policy adviser and West Wing aide, Denis Mc Donuough to replace Lew as chief of staff. He also renominated Richard Cordray, whose recess appointment as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was recently endangered by a federal appeals court, to the same position, and picked B Todd Jones, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, as the man to reinvigorate that agency. Otherwise, Tom Donilon will remain his national security adviser, and James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, So it goes in Obama's Washington, where new faces and fresh air are evidently not an operative concept. In such an atmosphere, the nomination of retired Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, the co chairman of the president's Intelligence Advisory Board, as secretary of defense was the equivalent of a thunderbolt from the blue. Republicans, in particular, reacted as if the president had just picked Noam Chomsky to run the Pentagon, as if, that is, Hagel were the outsider's outsider.