Pete [Hic!] Hegseth's Underlings Still Slapfighting In The War Room
Now a sixth senior adviser is out!
How’s it going with Pete Hegseth, the meathead who is somehow the secretary of Defense and not qualified to manage a peg-leg stand at a pirate convention? That former Fox News host said to engage in alcohol misuse who was credibly accused of sexual assault? The one cartooned all over with white nationalist tattoos, incapable of evenly shaving his own tiny sideburns? The smirking creep … you know who we mean.
Hegseth just can’t seem to get or keep good help, and there’s reportedly been nonstop fighting in the war room. Now a sixth person has left his office, 33-year-old “senior” advisor Justin Fulcher. Would Hegseth’s last departing adviser please toss out any empty vodka bottle that might still be dangling from SecDef’s lips and turn out the lights?
Last week the Washington Post reported a “tense” confrontation between Fulcher and his supervisor, Yinon Weiss, both minions from Elon Musk’s DOGE service. Reportedly on April 4, Fulcher and Weiss got into some kind of fight, and then Fulcher stormed into Hegseth’s office, tattling that Weiss had called Pentagon police and demanded that they remove him from his office. These guys are really bad at solving conflicts!
Fulcher had been in charge of some vital stuff: finding out who was leaking to the press that Hegseth was incompetent at his job, and fixin’ to let Elon Musk see top-secret information about China.
And Fulcher was reportedly the one who told Hegseth’s personal lawyer Tim Parlatore and then-chief of staff Joe Kasper that “he knew of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified the leakers.” But he was only going to tell them who the leakers were if he was allowed to be in charge of the investigation!
And so the wildly credulous pair reportedly said “sure!” and jumped right on his preposterous tale with both feet, oblivious to how the NSA spying on the Defense Department would be a much bigger, worse, illegal-er scandal than Elon Musk being able to access top-secret intelligence to try to get market advantage for his failing car business.
Tim Parlatore got right on the horn to the White House to crow that Hegseth and company had found the “smoking gun” incriminating three aides, based on that NSA wiretap, and that Hegseth had already fired the guilty. And the director of the NSA who also oversaw the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, Gen. Timothy Haugh, and the civilian deputy director, Wendy Noble, were quickly fired too.
Except, there was no NSA wiretap. Fulcher, or somebody, made it all up in a ham-handed attempt to quell Hegseth’s rage. Fulcher denies that any of this happened, and told The Guardian, “I never approached Parlatore, Kasper or anyone else offering ‘surveillance evidence’ and did not ask to join an investigation on that or any other basis.”
Why is Hegseth’s personal lawyer hanging around the Pentagon in the first place? What does the lawyer who previously defended the president and Hegseth’s accused raping know about military law?
Anyway, of course, the leaking-est boy all along was Hegseth, the guy who put war plans for Yemen on a Signal chat with Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Greenberg, and staged a press photo op with Musk while he strutted around the Pentagon in his too-tight black jeans. Just like Hegseth himself was the one who stood before a podium and admitted that the bomb the US dropped on Iran only damaged their nuclear program, but didn’t destroy it, and then attacked the media for reporting what everybody just heard him say.
It’s been one fail after another for ol’ Pickled Pisspants Pete; the only thing he’s succeeded at is driving people away. The Houthis are back to bombing ships in the Red Sea, and Israel has taken over bombing them. Israel did quit bombing Iran, but then started bombing Syria. At this rate he’ll never get to invade Canada, Panama and Greenland!
And last week the GOP-led House of Representatives Armed Services Committee delivered unto him a rare bitchslap, voting to keep Hegseth from renaming military bases after Confederates. You’ll recall he never had authority to rename bases, but he went HYURR DURR SUCK IT and did it anyway, renaming them to have the same last names as the original Confederate names that had been changed after 2020, but for different people with the same last names. Fort Benning was renamed Fort Moore in 2023, after Hal Moore, a highly decorated (white male) Vietnam-war hero, and then Hegseth re-named it back to Fort Benning, but supposedly this time after Fred Benning, a soldier who served in the Army in the first world war, instead of for Confederate officer Henry L. “Old Rock” Benning. BASED! KEK! Now even the GOP has told him to fuck on off with his stupid bullshit.
PREVIOUSLY!
And Hegseth invoked the president’s ire with that low-energy military birthday parade where the soldiers marched out of step, the crowds were sparse, and old poppy appeared to even doze off.
Hegseth’s National Guard invasion of Los Angeles was a flop, with hundreds of troops deployed away from home only to be stuffed into a tent city, bored and demoralized, and mostly standing around idly while ICE wilded out all over Southern California.
And speaking of the National Guard, apparently Chinese hackers have been breaching the National Guard’s systems for nearly a year? Ooops, maybe it’s a bad time to have fired the head of Cyber Command?
The Supreme Court did greenlight his trans military ban, so he’s got that going for him: thousands of willing, able and highly, expensively trained professionals leaving the service. And he has ousted the Naval Academy’s first female superintendent, Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, probably because, as he wrote in one of his books, “Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.” And he’s purged the Academy’s library of books that weren’t white-male-supremacist enough. Is America safe yet?
Yep, everybody hates Hegseth! Except for his third wife who follows him everywhere to make sure he keeps his dick in his pants, and also the one guy that matters, that game show host who hired him to be a TV guy standing there doing TV things. And as Alina Habba taught him and all the rest of us, if he can fake looking pretty for Sir, he doesn’t have to bother faking looking smart!
🇺🇸👊🔥🙏 🦅
[CBS / Washington Post gift link / Guardian / LA Times archive link / The Atlantic / NBC]
𝐷𝑎𝑑𝑠 𝑝𝑢𝑠ℎ 𝑢𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑘𝑠. 𝑀𝑜𝑚𝑠 𝑝𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑒𝑙𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑏𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑠.
More weapons-grade bullshit right there.
Seriously, WTAF?
Was JUST about to say "what does a girl have to do to get Lutnick off her screen?" and...I get my answer.