I'm not particularly sympathetic to military officers, but I had to feel a little sorry for whatever generals made the 15 hour flight from South Korea to Washington, DC, to have a pissant little TV bitch tell them that they're fat and then watch a barely awake president blather about his signature and his problem walking down stairs when he wasn't talking about how awesome it would be for troops to kill Americans in the city streets of the United States. I mean, beyond "this could have been a fucking Zoom call," imagine spending your whole life immersed in the ethos of the military, of the (at least theoretical) discipline and respect for the Constitution, and you gotta travel until your ass is numb to listen to two dumb motherfuckers say you should forget all that and just fuck shit up because the bulbous orange blob man is ordering it.
The speech by Secretary of Defense (sorry, it's not really the Department of War until Congress makes the change) Pete Hegseth, a drunk who beat his wife, for the forced-gathered leadership of the US military yesterday veered between embarrassingly masturbatory Patton fantasies and genuinely disturbing shifts in policy. Mostly, he wasn't really speaking to the generals, who were there as set dressing for a reel on Instagram. He started by announcing, "The era of the Department of Defense is over... the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: war-fighting, preparing for war and preparing to win. Unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit. Not because we want war. No one here wants war, but it's because we love peace." Which is kind of confusing. If you're the "Department of War," that seems to indicate you're going to start, you know, wars; whereas, the Department of Defense would be more concerned with maintaining peace than waging war. I know it's all nuance and bullshit, but the fucking chest-thumping is completely ludicrous. And when was the mission of our military not "war-fighting"? Isn't that what all the guns and bombs and training are for?
Of course, every single person sitting in that room knew that, had lived that, and understood that this fucking shit-for-brains telling them that was a goddamned insult.
So much of what Hegseth said was childish, ignorant, and deranged. "You kill people and break things for a living," he chest-pounded. "You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society. We are not an army of one. We are a joint force of millions of selfless Americans. We are warriors." Goddamn, he sounds like an incel desperate for likes while live-playing League of Legends on Twitch. Again, this fucking amateur, this pretender, this boy in grown-up clothes is saying this to hundreds of men and women who used to know exactly what the mission was but had that all scrambled for them. And let's be clear: the vast majority of people in the military, like 80-85% (if not more) are not frontline fighters. There's support staff, intelligence, logistics, maintenance, medical personnel, and more, and that's not counting the warriors whose job entails sitting in a trailer in the Nevada desert, piloting drones remotely for recon and for blowing shit up. Oh, and the IT departments that keep all that running.
Hegseth was wantonly, flagrantly insulting, whether it was his fat-shaming rant or his even stupider attack on beards (I guess those religious exemptions don't matter). And he said, "We fight not because we hate what's in front of us. We fight because we love what's behind us. You see, the Ivy League faculty lounges will never understand us, and that's okay because they could never do what you do." This moronic bitch doesn't get that a number of veterans are on Ivy League faculty, including former generals. And just calm down there, princess. It's not like defending the country is the hardest fucking concept to get your head around.
Now imagine the admiral who had to travel 20 hours from Manila to DC just to listen to a sleepy, deranged commander-in-chief talk about walking down stairs. No, seriously. Nearly an hour into his truly bizarre, disturbing, dementia-driven ramble about, fuck, I guess "stuff," Trump mocked Joe Biden for falling down stairs, which led to this extended...something...stream of consciousness? Inner monologue said out loud? Haints in his head he's having a conversation with? Honestly, I don't know...but this is really the president of the United States:
"I'm very careful when I walk downstairs, I'm on stairs like these stairs. I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall because it doesn't work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don't want that. You walk nice and easy. You don't have to set any record, be cool, be cool when you walk down. But don't bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs. I've never seen him. Bop, bop, bop. He'd go down the stairs, wouldn't hold on. I said, it's great. I don't want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president."
That's the guy who told the leaders of the military, who have had it hammered into them and hammer it into the soldiers they command that, as very clearly stated in the US Constitution, the US military doesn't wage war against Americans on American soil, that they will wage war against Americans on American soil. Trump said, using the quaint colloquial term for the n-word, "In our inner cities, which we're going to be talking about because it's a big part of war now, it's a big part of war."
Trump described the future battles this way: "The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within...Last month I signed an executive order to provide training for quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it's the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control once you're involved at all."
Every single one of those cities has seen a drop in crime. In New York City, shootings are lower than they've ever been. Murders are down. Robberies are down. If you send in troops, they'll just be picking up garbage like the National Guard soldiers are forced to do in DC because there's nothing else to fucking do because the police actually have a handle on the crime situation. Fuck reality, though. Fuck it raw.
One thing I don't get is why police unions aren't pissed off about all this talk. Yeah, we can say a lot of shit about how terrible cops are (and we should), and there are plenty of reasons that crime is down that have nothing to do with policing. But the president saying that troops need to invade cities in order to bring order is a fucking insult to the police in those cities. It's saying that they aren't doing their jobs. I mean, Christ, they already have all the military equipment they could want. It's redundant to send the actual army in.
Unless, of course, your goal isn't to stop crime but to pretend bad shit is going on so you can take over the cities and intimidate the population and be the mad king you were always destined to be.
It probably doesn't need to be said, but one thing that our military is not trained to do is be police (except for the ones trained as military police), and every general there knows it. I'm sure there are military leaders who are batshit crazy and would love to use "inner cities" as a "training ground" to attack "the enemy from within." But most aren't. Most know that if they are ordered to, it will be time to decide whether or not they are loyal to the obvious dementia-sufferer-in-chief or to the Constitution and the country.
Trump and Hegseth essentially undermined everything the United States is supposed to stand for, and they admit they don't give a fuck about history, about stability, about the rest of the world. In their very weird and very disturbed way, they have made life more dangerous for everyone on earth.
And now that Trump has declared that we are in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels, that's going to be his and Hegseth's and squamous tumor Stephen Miller's excuse to level what's left of the country they have already wrecked.
