This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 1st, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Chuck Hagel has endured a first round of confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense.

The most pointed criticisms came from fellow Republicans.

Chris Preble Vice President of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute

offers his thoughts.

There's a certain weirdness that just is inherent in these high-level hearings with potential cabinet members or high-level employees of cabinets?

The most important thing of course is to not say anything that could be deemed

controversial or contentious in any way you know the in each in this case or you know in the case of Harry

carries hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee these

committee members are the people that the nominee is going to have to work with if

he is confirmed and so there's a particular

incentive to be deferential and conciliatory as much as possible now if the

questioners are obviously not in a conciliatory mood you're kind of left to

to just kind of sit there and take it because otherwise if you're combative then are you seen as being uncooperative or you

know difficult etc and and I think that that's what we saw a little bit yesterday

so what does I mean what's what happens now what do we do we actually learn anything in these

hearings we learned that John McCain still really really cares about

the war in Iraq he chose to spend his time talking about

Iraq and he obviously cares about it. I mean obviously it's not good for him politically.

It wasn't good for him politically in 2008. It wasn't good for the political for the Republican Party in 2008 and 2012 even and yet he seemed to want to

spend a lot of time talking about it and spend a lot of time talking about Chuck Hale's opposition,

...