Pete Hegseth Already So Good At Pentagon-ning, He Doesn't Even Need Drinks!

Allegedly!

How did the first day in the office go for newly sworn in secretary of Defense Pete (hic) Hegseth? Well, much to our surprise, he did not stumble getting out of his chauffeured SUV when he arrived at the Pentagon, nor did he appear to be gripping a bottle of Ripple like a mountaineer high above a crevasse clinging to his rapidly fraying safety rope while his legs dangled over the abyss. We are counting this as a slightly-less-than-disastrous start.

Hegseth had already given his first order as SecDef on Sunday on the site formerly known as Twitter. Did he want to talk to the public about military readiness, or homeland protection, or assisting other nations in defense of freedom around the globe, or some other rah-rah imperialistic hubris crap?

No, of course not, he went out of his way to let us know that starting Monday, no longer would America sleep under the weakly flapping banner of a military made soft by treating all its personnel with respect and dignity. Because dignity doesn’t slaughter thousands of enemies, you weenies:

Remember when Donald Rumsfeld was famous for what he called his “snowflakes”? Little memos, sometimes as short as one sentence, that he would fire out from his office in a constant stream throughout the day? The new guy has out-dumbed Rumsfeld by posting handwritten orders on a social media site. But thank you for saving us from the nation-destroying specter of a transgender soldier changing their name.

Then on Monday Hegseth stood in front of the scrum of reporters stationed in front of the Pentagon, some of whom might have been eager to see if he would show up sober on his first day, considering what so many have said about him in that regard. Hegseth ran off a litany of horseshit about the “warfighters” and how awesome Donald Trump is and how Pete Hegseth is going to put an iron dome of masculinity around the Pentagon, or something.

He also wanted to let soldiers know that he knows they exist, which was nice of him:

“Every moment that I’m here, I’m thinking about the guys (pauses as he remembers that women also serve) and gals in Guam, in Germany, Fort Benning and Fort Bragg.”

We suppose his reference to these two bases is a signal that they are getting their old names back, and probably soon. It was one of Trump’s campaign promises. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Fort Bragg was renamed Fort Liberty. Fort Benning was renamed Fort Moore, after Hal Moore, a highly decorated war hero. We do not know what Hegseth has against the word “liberty” or against war heroes that he would rather name those two bases after a couple of feckless Confederate generals who got their asses kicked in the Civil War. The Lost Cause, it does endure for some goddamn reason.

Hegseth also referred to executive orders that Trump was expected to sign on Monday. These orders, per CNN, will ban transgender soldiers from the military, gut the military’s DEI programs that dipshits like Hegseth think made the military weak, and reinstate any soldiers who were discharged for refusing a COVID vaccine.

Boy, too bad Pete Hegseth wasn’t SecDef when we invaded Iraq, there wouldn’t have been any of that namby-pamby getting our butts kicked by insurgents, which only happened because of woke, probably.

But now Pete’s going to clean everything up, just in time to send military units to the southern border to fight the deadliest enemy of all: starving migrant children fleeing gangs and economic despair in the poorer nations where they were born.

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Pete Hegseth Police Report Released, And Yikes, It's Awful

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Even before Hegseth’s Twitter post, the military had been scrambling to comply with the president’s orders to remove all traces of DEI training from every corner of the organization. This had led to an outcry when the Air Force pulled videos about the Tuskegee Airmen from its training, just on the off-chance that anti-diversity initiatives meant not acknowledging that Black people fought in World War II.

Naturally, the president’s allies were incensed — INCENSED WE TELL YOU — about this obvious act of bureaucratic ass-covering:

Supporters of the Trump administration responded angrily to the flurry of negative stories, accusing Air Force officials of “malicious compliance” with the administration’s DEI crackdown and arguing that in removing the videos from training, the service was attempting to make Trump look bad.

It’s always someone else’s fault.

The “malicious compliance” part is what gets us. Anyone with experience in large bureaucracies knows that in the face of vague directions such as Trump’s executive orders, people are going to cast a very wide net to make sure they are complying and won’t get yelled at. Or chewed out the MAGA mediocrity hire up there in that video.

Personally, we think the Trumpists could pause for a second and wonder why faceless bureaucrats were so familiar with their program that they assumed they needed to hide any material that referred positively to Black people. But that would require some self-reflection, which is not in their skillset.

OPEN THREAD, A BIT BEHIND SCHEDULE, BUT YOU’LL GET OVER IT.

[YouTube / CNN / Washington Post]

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