Hegseth Summons Entire Military Leadership For In-Person Lecture, Shots

Is Secretary Shitfaced feeling lonely because no one wants to drink with him?

Imagine you are an admiral in the United States Navy. You are on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, halfway through a nine-month deployment, overseeing a battle group with an air wing that patrols the volatile Middle East daily and warships that are trying to protect commercial shipping from the occasional missile hurled in its direction by the Houthi rebels in Yemen. It’s stressful, but you are doing your job. You are, as they say, on mission.

And then you are ordered by sozzled knob-head Pete Hegseth, the most brain-damaged Secretary of Defense since Deacon Jones, to drop everything so you can fly 6,000 miles to Virginia and listen to him lecture you about the “warrior ethos,” a concept he apparently came up with while spending years on Fox News lobbying Donald Trump to pardon war criminals.

Sure, the military has trained you for years to obey the civilians who run the Defense Department and oversee America’s far-flung empire. But still, you’re going to roll your eyes so hard that Hegseth can hear them rattle from the Pentagon, right?

At least you are not alone. Last week Hegseth ordered every admiral and general in the military (about 800 in all), along with their senior enlisted leaders, to gather this Tuesday in one room in Quantico, Virginia, so he can give this little 30-minute pep talk. Because if there is anything career military people need, it’s to be pulled away from their commands for a lecture from a boozehound who couldn’t successfully run a veterans’ charity.

Or maybe there is no lecture; maybe Secretary Duff Man just wants to booze it up and he hates drinking alone. Are there better drinking buddies than the ones you can order to meet you at a bar?

From The Washington Post:

“It’s meant to be an eyeball-to-eyeball kind of conversation,” one person familiar with ongoing discussions said. “He wants to see the generals.”

There has been some speculation online from academics and others that Hegseth is bringing all the officers to see him for some incredibly dystopic reason. Maybe he wants to demand they all swear a loyalty oath to him, or to the president, and he’ll purge anyone who refuses.

Hegseth himself responded on X to that idea:

That’s not a no!

Our opinion is that this trip has nothing to do with purges or swearing fealty to the MAGA agenda, or anything along those lines. Although that might be unavoidable, which we’ll get to in a minute.

What Hegseth, this bigoted mediocrity, wants is to feel important. He likes the ego boost of being able to order career flag officers to drop everything and fly halfway around the world to listen to him yammer in person.

Why not do this over videoconferencing? Surely the military has the capability. Or email. This seems like it’s going to be such a “This meeting could have been an email” experience that we’re going to have to retire the cliche.

Pete Hegseth Can't Hire Employees Because Everyone Hates Him

And to top off this incredibly stupid, useless, worthless, wasteful, dangerous time suck of an idea, Donald Trump has now decided he’ll also attend the meeting. Which figures, there was no way Pumpkin Pinochet was going to let Hegseth have all the fun with every military flag officer currently on active duty a short Marine One ride from the White House. Plus, he must at all times make sure everyone knows who’s boss:

“It’s really just a very nice meeting talking about how well we’re doing militarily, talking about being in great shape, talking about a lot of good, positive things. It’s just a good message,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. “We have some great people coming in and it’s just an ‘esprit de corps.’ You know the expression ‘esprit de corps’? That’s all it’s about. We’re talking about what we’re doing, what they’re doing, and how we’re doing.”

This is one of Trump’s pep rallies. He and Hegseth are flying every military one-star and above on the planet, at the cost of likely millions of taxpayer dollars, to one of his pep rallies. Which is ironic, since the military has a rule that members cannot attend political rallies in uniform.

The problem here is that the brass might feel compelled to applaud even if some of them don’t want to, much in the same way that North Korean generals and party officials will applaud Kim Jong-un with great enthusiasm so they don’t get dragged off to a gulag.

Bill Kristol, of all damn people, noted this at The Bulwark:

The point will be to force the generals to applaud such statements, to broadcast that applause—and thereby to signal to all their troops, and to the American public, that the military brass is on board with Trump’s authoritarian agenda. The message would be that this is not simply the United States military but that it is Donald Trump’s military.

Woke Bill Kristol continues to be one of the more jarring developments of this era. But he is correct that this is how the images will play, and also correct when he says the brass should sit on their hands and not give Trump and Secretary Shitfaced the satisfaction.

Hegseth pulled another stunt last week that is intended to let the military know that doing war crimes is, like, so hot right now.

Sure, modern military doctrine and international law may talk about limiting civilian casualties and not committing war crimes in battle. But we know Hegseth thinks having to worry about stuff like that has made America’s warriors weak, and he wants the military to “return to lethality.”

So What Kinds Of Illegal Orders Is Pete Hegseth Planning On Obeying?

With that in mind, Hegseth announced that he has decided that American soldiers at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 will get to keep their Medals of Honor. Because nothing says honor like slaughtering hundreds of Native American men, women, and children who were unarmed and in some cases in the process of surrendering to the American military.

From The Guardian:

Hegseth’s Democratic predecessor at the Pentagon, former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the honors in 2024 after Congress called for it in the 2022 defense bill. Announcing the review, the Pentagon said Austin wanted to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor”.

Austin had not made a decision before he left office in January, leaving it up to Pete Hegseth. Given Hegseth’s history of stanning convicted war criminals until Trump pardons them, he has unsurprisingly chosen to let the dead soldiers keep the military’s highest award for bravery.

Being Hegseth, he also had to make it sound like a victory over the horrific forces of wokism. He posted a video in which he sneered that Lloyd Austin was “more concerned with being politically correct than historically correct.” He also claimed that the review panel had written in its final report that the medals were correctly awarded. No, he has so far not announced any plans to release that report so we can see if he’s lying.

Hegseth also said that his decision is final, and the soldiers’ “place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.” As if some future Secretary of Defense, perhaps one who has better morals than a syphilitic alley cat, will not have the power and authority to revisit this decision.

All of this — the speech to the brass, the allowing murderers to keep their medals — is meant to convey the idea that Pete Hegseth is large and in charge. When in fact if he was really large and in charge, he would not need to put on all this performative spectacle. He’s a weak man, and all the applause from military leaders and anyone watching him do keg stands won’t change that.

[WaPo / WaPo / The Guardian]

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