Pete Hegseth Not At All Paranoid About His Job, WHO TOLD YOU HE WAS PARANOID???
Defense Secretary Days of Wine and Roses is doing great.
The Defense Department of the United States is the largest bureaucracy in the world, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million employees. That number includes about 1.4 million uniformed military personnel and close to 800,000 National Guard troops and reservists. The DoD oversees several intelligence agencies. It is responsible for the development, building, operation, and maintenance of some of the most destructive weapons platforms ever created by man. It is responsible for an awesome amount of military power that, unleashed, could bring about more death and suffering than our human brains can really comprehend.
And right now, the DoD is led by a plague of idiots behaving like a high school girls soccer team driven to cannibalism after a plane crash stranded them in the wilderness. Only cattier.
Standing atop this pile of dogshit is Pete Hegseth, the latest in a long line of mediocrities in this nation lucky enough to drink their way into a powerful job. (Yay, America!) Hegseth’s three-month tenure as secretary of Defense has been a string of giant fuck-ups like using Signal to disperse classified info about military strikes, interrupted only by his frequent bombastic TV hits on Fox News and the hilarious displays he posts on social media of himself doing allegedly macho stuff like lifting weights with Green Berets while hollering about reclaiming the military for the warfighters.
Or something like that, we don’t know, after years of doing this work, all the wingnuts’ keyboard machismo is basically our white noise machine.
Hegseth has been much in the news lately because the Pentagon he’s in charge of has sprung more leaks than the Lusitania after its unfortunate run-in with a German U-boat. Now there is a mole hunt going on to find the leakers, which already led to three of Hegseth’s top aides being escorted out of the Pentagon in a 24-hour period. Those aides are both suing over their terminations and going on a media offensive that basically has them dragging a cross from podcast studio to podcast studio in search of sympathy from feral MAGAworld denizens.
One of the fired aides, Colin Carroll, took his act to Megyn Kelly on her eponymous show, where she gracefully took a break from yelling about transgender people to listen to Carroll explain that half of Hegseth’s time is spent on finding leakers, the other half is spent doing planks with SEAL Team 6, and if there is any time in the day left over, maybe he does something related to his actual job.
From The Daily Beast:
“I think it’s kind of consumed the team a little bit… If you look at a pie chart of the secretary’s day, at this point, 50 percent of it is probably leak investigation. Press. It’s that,” one of the fired aides, Colin Carroll, said during the latest episode of The Megyn Kelly Show.
“That’s a bad thing for America. It’s a bad thing for the president’s objectives,” added Carroll, who had served as chief of staff to the deputy secretary of defense. “And in order to combat that image, it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go work out with the troops.’”
Well sure, there is nothing Trump likes more than turning on his TV and seeing his minions play the role of Secretary of Defense or Homeland Security on the Amazon Prime original series “I’m a Big-Boy President!” that he personally cast. That’s why Hegseth got the role: He’s a doofus, but he’s telegenic. To a man who can’t stand up from a chair without getting winded, he’s the second coming of Audie Murphy.
“If you’re taking a half-day trip to the Naval Academy at the same time the budget is due, and we really need some support here, come on, you gotta weigh priorities,” he said.
Buddy, does Pete Hegseth look like a man who can do math? You’re probably better off if he wants to ditch the budget meetings for leg day with Delta Force.
Carroll’s firing was allegedly the result of a power struggle between himself, the other two fired aides, and Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s chief of staff. Sorry, ex-chief of staff, since Kasper left the office last Thursday amid allegations that he constantly belittled uniformed military personnel by referring to them with an inferior rank and spending time in meetings describing his planet-sized bowel movements.
Now, reports are that Carroll wants to sue Kasper for defamation. To that end, he has allegedly been calling people to chase down a rumor that Kasper used cocaine while at a previous job. He even allegedly called Kasper’s wife to ask about the Bolivian marching powder rumor.
Forget what we said earlier about the high school girls soccer team. High schools are bastions of maturity compared to this crowd.
All the pressure may be getting to Hegseth. At one point, Kelly asked Carroll if he thought the Defense secretary was “okay,” to which Carroll responded, “I don’t know.” Well, that’s not what you want to hear about the person in charge of the world’s most powerful military.
Other reports say Hegseth has gotten so paranoid, he screamed, “I’ll hook you up to a fucking polygraph” at Adm. Christopher Grady, who was then the acting Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and does not look at all like a man you want to scream threats at, even if you technically do outrank him.
Threatening flag officers with polygraphs because someone leaked to the media that you were giving Elon Musk a briefing on China’s military capabilities? Does that sound like a man who is even remotely in control of anything besides the heaviness of his pours?
To top it all off, Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, has been around so much that Pentagon staff refer to her as either the “human leash” or Yoko Ono. One source told the Daily Beast that Jennifer Hegseth is her husband’s “parole officer and PR agent,” and is there to keep her husband from drinking or boinking women who aren’t her. (Given that before their marriage he was boinking her while still married to someone else, we suppose her concern is understandable.)
In return, her husband has plastered her picture all over the Pentagon, which is not going to help the Yoko Ono comparisons.
On Monday, Trump gave Hegseth a less-than-enthusiastic endorsement in an interview with The Atlantic:
“I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.”
Okay, no hurry! The rest of the world, which already hates us, will surely wait on Pete Hegseth to get his act together.
To sum up, our current Defense secretary, a man known to be an excessive drinker if not sliding into full-blown alcoholism, is growing more and more paranoid while falling on his face in this incredibly stressful job, where he has surrounded himself with a staff of backbiting and incompetent juveniles, all while his wife is hovering over him at every step to make sure he isn’t banging the first E-4 he sees in the Pentagon’s hallways every morning.
About the one thing he has going for him is that Trump is loathe to fire anyone in his Cabinet no matter how badly they fuck up, because he doesn’t want to give the media and Democrats a reason to say he sucks at being president. Although at this point, what’s one more link in a chain that you could wrap around the planet twice?
“I wish I could definitively say he’s totally fine, but I don’t know,” Colin Carroll told Megyn Kelly. Great. We’ll be in our fallout shelter.
[Daily Beast / Daily Beast / The Atlantic]
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Yoko Ono was an artist in her own right, so I'm not sure the comparison is fair. But who knows--maybe the current wife of the DUI hire will become alienated and will write a riveting tell - all.
In the meantime, I hope our nation survives this threat to our national security. I wish I were joking.
"The Peter Principal" on nuclear enhanced steroids.