What’s Secretary Of Defense Boozehole Up To This Week?
Meeting with Elon Musk, insulting judges and scrubbing web pages, very professional.
We imagine Ol’ Pistol Pete Hegseth has been spending his free time stroking his tattoos waiting for the American Christian Crusade and open season on “leftists” and Muslims, but until that glorious day, he still has a Pentagon to run in between talk show appearances. And in his Pentagon, the greatest threat to America is not Russia, or China, but the handful of trans troops who have been serving without incident for more than a decade; all of the non-white-Christian-man soldiers who are making the white-Christian-man soldiers feel inferior by being good at their jobs; and the mean judges who are trying to make him and Daddy Trump follow the law.
The DUI hire is super pissed that Judge Ana Reyes has blocked Trump’s January 27 trans ban. From Reyes’s ruling:
The Military Ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.
Judge Reyes also took a moment in court to torch Hegseth’s lack of experience, and the way neither he nor the DOJ lawyers had even read the studies or statements from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that they cited in support of their own order.
“Should I defer to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had a stellar military career … or should I defer to Hegseth?” Who has been “secretary of Defense for about 30 days” with “no prior deployment” other than “an early military career … prior to his television career?” She wondered.
Judge Reyes also pointed out that Hegseth’s public statements and Xitter posts that transgender troops were barred from serving with “no exemptions” contradicted how government lawyers put in their filing that decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis. And she told the government’s lawyers to instruct Hegseth to issue a clarifying statement by today explaining which is it? Which has not happened yet. Judge Reyes put a hold on her order until Friday to give the government a chance to appeal, and ordered the military not to separate any troops in the meantime.
And so Hegseth took to Xitter to attack her, very normal, very professional.
Ooh, “Judge” is in quotes, you sure told her! And calling her “they,” sick burn bro! So much for how DOJ lawyers tried to argue in court that the trans ban is not about “animus.”
And while Hegseth may have been placed on “top” because President Bone Spurs liked what he saw of him on the teevee, Hegseth has no experience as a “military planner” himself. He spent 11 months in the National Guard guarding detainees in Guantanamo Bay and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the only thing close to military planning he’s done was mismanage a couple of veteran’s charities and allegedly drunkenly sexually harass their employees.
“We are appealing this decision, and we will win,” he huffed. Uh huh.
Running the Pentagon is seemingly a busy job, but somehow Hegseth also found the time to post a poll on if the Department of Defense should be changed to the Department of War. What about the Department of No Wars, like Trump promised?
Ho ho ho, so much for no wars, we’re bombing Houthis and seriously considering invading our allies Greenland and Panama now.
And he’s also been staying on top of ordering the scrubbing of Pentagon web pages, trying to delete anybody who’s not a straight white cis man off of them, including World War II veteran and civil rights hero Medgar Evers, who was shot in his own driveway 1963 by a fertilizer salesman named Byron de la Beckwith. The movie Ghosts of Mississippi is about it.
Also web pages about Navajo Code talker units, Ira Hayes, and about 26,000 other images.
And, the New York Times reported Friday that Elon Musk was scheduled to meet with Hegseth and the four-star admiral in charge of the Indo-Pacific area, Samuel Paparo, at the DoD to talk in a secure room about the United States’s contingency plans should a war break out with China. Musk, of course, has no official job at the Pentagon or anywhere in government other than as Trump’s emotional support billionaire, does have business interests in China, and has no business whatsoever looking at any secret military plans.
After the NYT dropped the dime, the secure room was reportedly immediately scuttled and replaced with a “vanilla version,” with just Hegseth and Musk jawboning. Trump and Musk both rage TruthXitted about it, which Hegseth reposted. Groused Trump,
The New York Times is pure propaganda.
Also, I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT.
They will be found.
And Bone Spurs grumbled to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday,
I don't want to show [war plans for China] to anybody. But certainly, you wouldn't show it to a businessman who is helping us so much. He's a great patriot ... But I certainly wouldn't want -- you know, Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible perhaps to that. But it was such a fake story.
And Hegseth claimed that Musk was at the Pentagon to talk about DOGE.
"There was no war plans. There was no Chinese war plans. There was no secret plans. That's not what we were doing at the Pentagon.” [sic, sic, sic]
Sounds like a lot, maybe too much, protesting, there, Pete.
Hegseth headed off today for a tour of the Pacific, starting in Hawai’i, then Guam and the Philippines, to try to convince our Asian allies that the US doesn’t plan to screw them over the way we did Europe, Canada, Mexico and all of our other former friends, you betcha.
But it’s okay because he’s left new Deputy Secretary of Defense, Stephen Feinberg, in charge. Feinberg is a billionaire Trump donor with no military experience whatsoever, other than refusing to say if Russia attacked Ukraine.
Well, isn’t all that great, and don’t you feel safer now?
[New York Times archive link “Pentagon Set Up Briefing for Musk on Potential War With China” / New York Times archive link “Why the Pentagon Scuttled Its Briefing of Musk on War Plans”]
Hegseth objected to the Court's ruling, saying his path forward is Everclear.
Department of War or Department of Insecure Masculinity Studies?