Pete Hegseth, secretary of Defense and connoisseur of the finest fortified wines available at your local gas station, is big on his own definition of merit being the most important criteria for hiring. Surprise! It’s not a definition of merit that anyone would recognize outside a meeting of your local klavern.
Which is ironic, given that he has zero qualifications for his current job beyond the sort of strong jawline and ability to suck up that gets Donald Trump all tingly in his desiccated nether regions.
It also makes the latest leak out of the Pentagon about exactly how Hegseth has been yanking the pending promotions of senior officers and sending them off into unwanted retirement more enraging. Most of these retirements are female and/or gay and/or officers of color, because in addition to being dumber than a sack of hair, Pete Hegseth is also a misogynist and a bigot.
We have known for some time that Hegseth has been trying to turn the military and its leadership back into the segregated, all-white-boys club it was before Harry Truman ordered it to integrate. But we didn’t know the exact process. Nor did we know that Hegseth’s office did what it could to cover its tracks like a teenager hiding his crusted underwear in the bottom of the laundry hamper:
Hegseth’s executive office led a planned and deliberate process that involved creating paper-only files filled with printouts from internet searches that were inaccessible to the officers under consideration. Hegseth’s office gave instructions about the new criteria over the phone instead of in writing.
Yeah, they knew exactly what they were doing and exactly how it would look to anyone born after about 1941.
And what was in those paper-only files? Apparently people in Hegseth’s office were googling the promotion candidates’ names to see if they had ever randomly done something Pete Hegseth finds unforgivable, such as treating gay people like human beings:
Some of the findings put into the paper-only files included officers who allowed a celebration that included rainbow flags, a Pride Month event and stood up a diversity committee and task force on the USS Kearsarge to combat discrimination.
Imagine you are a career military officer. You have been steadily climbing the ranks for decades, following orders, taking initiative, leading every command you have with honor and distinction, earning the highest of praise and glowing service evaluations from your superiors. Now you are a step away from a long-hoped-for promotion to flag officer. Finally, you will join the highest ranks of the military, the pinnacle of career achievement.
Then some chud in Pete Hegseth’s office googles you and finds out you attended a diversity seminar at some backwater Ohio college while you were stationed at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton in 1998. Suddenly its goodbye star on your shoulder boards and hello early retirement.
Oh, and it might have been illegal in addition to being immoral and just kind of shitty:
A defense secretary can only delay or withhold a promotion for specific reasons, such as being professionally unqualified, failing “exemplary conduct” standards, pending charges or substantiated adverse information.
On Planet Hegseth, a failure of exemplary conduct means you encouraged soldiers to get the COVID vaccine. Whoever did that is probably lucky they only lost a promotion and weren’t sentenced to hard labor at Fort Leavenworth.
On the plus side, there is a solid chance Hegseth gets impeached by the House this week. On Monday, retiring Kentucky representative Thomas Massie introduced articles of impeachment that will now have to be voted on. They are pretty brutal! Massie accuses Hegseth of waging war without congressional authorization, ignoring laws about minimizing civilian casualties, kidnapping Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, executing 243 fishermen by droning their boats, and being a dick to Sen. Mark Kelly.
Hegseth did a press conference at 8 a.m. Eastern to respond, which you can unhide by clicking this button that says to unhide his stupid face.
Frankly, we don’t know why Hegseth isn’t being tried for murder. Or at least indicted by some international body. (The Justice Department certainly won’t do it.) Come on, International Criminal Court, fuck him up.
You may remember that when Massie was threatening to impeach Hegseth earlier in the fall, Mike Johnson shut the House down and sent everyone home for a few weeks rather than let Massie force this vote right before the elections. Now, if the impeachment passes and the Senate doesn’t have time for a trial before the holidays, the next Congress can pick the issue back up when Dems have a (likely) eight-seat majority.
Democrats would need about a dozen Republicans to join in convicting and removing Hegseth from office. We wouldn’t be dumb enough to predict that will happen, but Hegseth is so loathed on Capitol Hill that Dems could pick up a few votes. It will be up to Republicans to decide if they really are still that terrified of President Pudding-for-Brains:
There’s something sad about watching the old man try to prove he still has some juice.
After introducing the impeachment articles, Massie was feeling rather puckish when he spoke to reporters:
We were going to say meow, but you know what? That probably is exactly what Hegseth will say at some point.
For his part, Whiskey Dick Pete spent Monday giving an apparently unhinged speech at the Naval War College in Rhode Island and defending his shitty record to reporters:
Man, the problem is not that we’ve achieved whatever your definition of success is. The problem is that you did any of this illegal and immoral shit in the first place. You killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people! You are one of America’s most successful mass murderers!
Now that we’re enraged, let’s watch John Oliver calm us down by dunking on Hegseth for 35 minutes:
[MS NOW]
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His press conference was dripping with bullshit. Even The Hague is too good for him!! The questions he took were friendly fluff that didn’t ask or confront him with his crimes. Fuck Hegseth and all of Trumps sycophants!
Before making a comment, I have twice thought to myself, Skepti's going to like this and double down on the taunt.