Pete Hegseth does not seem to get that his job is to play the TV Defense secretary, because our two-bit dictator is more obsessed with the performance of masculinity than Tom of Finland. Big Daddy Trump just wants a GI Joe doll who can talk good, and all Boozehole’s gotta do to make Dear Leader happy is pat some pretty makeup on top of his grey pallor, stick in his earpiece, make unga bunga WE IS KILLING MUSLIMS noises at Fox News, and then he can get right back to blending chocolate choo-choos or piña coladas and putting little umbrellas and skewers of fruit in them, or if it is after noon, crawl under his desk with a flask of Old Grand Dad, and let experienced people do the actual work. It should be pretty easy! He could even take all the credit!
But Pete wants to play Defense Secretary for real, so he can brag to his third wife and his lawyer and his Ulta Beauty makeup consultant that he’s the guy who controls the pew pews and the boom booms. Is his lawyer Tim Parlatore charging him by the quarter hour to read that stuff? Is he sending the chat to his wife so she can gentle-parent him through it?
Maybe he should add Mrs. Frazzled to his chat instead.
Anyway, back to the latest meltdown! That liberal rag the Wall Street Journal reports that after it leaked that Elon Musk was going to be getting a classified briefing on China, and Big Daddy heard about it and disapproved, Hegseth went on a screaming tirade at Admiral Christopher Grady, the then-acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accusing him of being the leaker and hollering, “I’ll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!”
Let’s take a look at this guy and his resume, shall we? Only the oldest salt in the Navy, who thirty years ago had more experience than Hegseth to lead the Defense Department.
I could watch this guy steal a parking place right in front of me at the Trader Joe’s with my own eyes and wouldn’t even throw him a stink face. Screaming at him doesn’t seem like the actions of a sober person, just saying. Anyway, reports WSJ, “Grady was never subjected to a polygraph, and Hegseth would go on to accuse a number of other people for the leak, including Lt. Gen. Doug Sims, the Joint Staff director, whom Hegseth also threatened with a polygraph test.”
Let’s look at Sims’s resume too! TL;DR: another guy who had more leadership experience before Hegseth was old enough to grow a pube. If Trump was actively trying to demoralize and hamstring the military it wouldn’t look any different from this.
Anyway, sometime after that screaming meltdown (or maybe it was a different screaming meltdown, he has like two a day!), five more of Hegseth’s own people quit, and he replaced two of them with those 20-somethings with no defense experience. And then at least four of his own people ratted Hegseth out to the New York Times for that second Signal chat, which Hegseth started himself.
![Pete Hegseth's Pentagon Still Very Well-Lubricated We Mean Oiled [Hic!] Machine](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1579001429338-5d9142a49ac2?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wzMDAzMzh8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHw2Mnx8ZWFnbGV8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzQ1MjQ0Njc2fDA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=1080)
And that’s not all! The AP has reported that Hegseth had an unsecured line installed in his office to let him use Signal on a personal computer, which would mask his IP address and let him avoid recordkeeping laws, and also access sites that would otherwise have been blocked.
Who is he communicating with on this personal computer? Could it be Russia? Nobody knows, but it seems significant that one of the first things he did was halt offensive cybersecurity operations against Russia. Maybe because he did not want any of that cybersecurity investigating leading back to him? Just spitballing, here. It could also have been to chat with OnlyFans models, we have no idea. Regardless, such a device would be vulnerable to spying, which is why everybody else who entered his office would not even be allowed to bring such a device into the room. While in the meantime there Pete was, sitting on his personal laptop and chatting away with whomever.
Once again, any other person in the military who did one of these things would be looking at maybe getting kicked out of the military, or even jailtime.
But tell us some more about how it’s trans people harming the US’s “military readiness” with their pronouns! Yeah, that’s not going great either: Hegseth’s hateful and stupid military “trans ban” (that DOJ lawyers keep swearing in court is not a trans ban) keeps catching L’s in court. Two federal judges have refused to let the Pentagon kick out some 1,000 transgender troops, and now a federal district court has ordered the Pentagon to resume gender-affirming care for transgender service members. The Trump administration has run to the Supreme Court to EMERGENCY let them do a trans ban anyway, and guess we shall find out what fantasy Sam “vergogna” Alito makes up to justify ignoring lower courts.
But as of right now, Pete still has a job! He is using his platform to rally the troops by telling them that they’re too fat. “They need to be sharp, not shabby. Especially our leaders.” Good thing the Commander-In-Chief is 6’3” and 224 pounds, or he might be offended.
Will his job last longer than a head of lettuce? Place your bets!
[Wall Street Journal gift link / AP / Politico / SCOTUSblog]
Former Congressman George Santos has been sentenced to 87 months in federal prison.
Pina colada libelz!