Chuck Hagel: "If We Don't Debate This, We Are Not Worthy Of Our Country..."

Chuck Hagel - for all Norm Coleman and Richard Luger's meandering around questions about Iraq and Bush's surge - became the only Republican with balls today by being the only one of them on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote for a non-binding resolution he and Dem Joe Biden penned to insist on Senate and House Rep oversight of Bush's "new way forward" (which sounds a lot like the old way backwards) in Iraq.

For the full transcript of Hagel's comments, including the following, go here:

I don't think we've ever had a coherent strategy. In fact, I would even challenge the administration today to show us the plan that the president talked about the other night. There is no plan. I happen to know that Pentagon planners were on their way to Central Com over the weekend -- they haven't even Team B'ed this plan.... There is no strategy. This is a ping-pong game with American lives.... We'd better be damned sure what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more lives into that grinder.... and I want every one of you, every one of us, 100 senators to look in that camera, and you tell your people back home what you think. Don't hide any more, none of us."