A moral imperative
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Two years ago, in January of 2024, when there was time to avoid catastrophe, I wrote the following:
There is something that must be understood about what terrifies President Obama, Michelle Obama, President Clinton, Secretary Clinton, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Panetta, and scores of America’s most serious, sober, and competent statesmen and women and leaders of the US military.
They all understand that a second Trump presidency will be catastrophic, but more than that, they all have a sense of history and here is what that means:
Should Donald Trump return to power, every second of the ubiquitous chaos of the last eight years, including his whole first term, will be a historical blip, a speed bump barely worth a few paragraphs.
Should he win, the story will just now be beginning.
What is to come is the history that will be remembered.
Like always, there will be a recollection of the warnings, but most people will simply say that they had no idea, they didn’t know, that no one could.
Who could have seen it coming after all?
I published the following on December 3, 2024:
The world we live in is far from perfect, but it has survived for 80 years with the power of Armageddon within the hands of a few human beings.
The security of the world has been maintained imperfectly by American power.
The institutions that were created to save humanity from destruction after the Second World War were imagined into existence by the genius of Franklin Roosevelt, who said that he hoped they would endure for as long as everyone who was alive on the day the war was won lived.
The youngest of those people is almost 80 years old.
A new era has begun.
The jingoistic and performative displays of patriotism that have been packaged into the NFL marketing strategy for many years have helped create a culture of blind cheers for uniforms.
They have been stripped of any meaning, and they blind the American people to the purpose of our armed forces, which isn’t power, but the preservation of peace.
The responsibility for America’s sons and daughters who volunteer to go into harm’s way is immense for the nation’s leaders.
A vote to confirm Pete Hegseth is a deep betrayal of the men and women who wear the cloth of the nation.
He is unfit mentally, morally and temperamentally to lead the American military and order lethal actions.
He was unable to run a 10-person $5 million charity, and he’s going to run the most complex and lethal institution on Earth that controls 5,044 nuclear warheads.
Here is what Jane Mayer, arguably the nation’s best investigative journalist, reported about Pete Hegseth in The New Yorker:
A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.
A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.
The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.
The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.”
In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”
As reported in The New York Times, he is an abuser of women, according to his mother, who wrote this:
On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself.
I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.
You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.
Champagne Pete has been Secretary of Defense for 305 days. During that time, he has commenced a secret war in the Caribbean, endangered the lives of American pilots by disclosing war plans in a Signal chat, politicized the Defense Department, illegally changed the name of the department, and preposterously assumed the title of “Secretary of War,” which does not exist in America. He has removed journalists from the Pentagon, commenced a regime of Captain Queeg-like polygraph tests to test the loyalty of subordinates, assembled the nation’s flag officers for a lecture they mocked and derided, and injected a far-right Christian nationalist poison into the ethos of the US military. He is the singularly most incompetent and morally compromised individual to ever lead the US military.
He is a first-rate extremist, drunk and womanizer.
He is a bottom-of-the-barrel leader, a scumbag’s scumbag, who is festooned in tattoos denoting extremism. He is sided up with a nutball pastor, who is an apologist for rape, slavery and the abuse of women.
Pete Hegseth is an abomination in a regime filled with them.
The threat to recall Senator Mark Kelly to active duty to face court martial for participating in a video that asserted red letter of law to US Forces is a farce. It is yet another assault by the Article 2 branch of government on the Article 1 branch.
The notion that a retired US Navy captain could be recalled to active duty to face court martial by a corrupt cabinet official because, as a US senator, he criticized the incumbent president is absurd.
It is unconstitutional.
The US Military has a long tradition of Mickey Mouse court martials. Some of the greatest patriots in American history have been tried by kangaroo tribunals. Among them are General Benjamin O. Davis, Lieutenant Jackie Robinson and Lieutenant Dick Winters. Article 37 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice speaks to the impropriety and illegality of undue command influence around military prosecutions. Imagining it was possible to court martial Mark Kelly — which it isn’t — would mean that he was joining an illustrious list.
What Hegseth is doing is illegal under military law. That he is doing it on behalf of an insane commander in chief, who has taken to impersonating a bloated orange Captain Ahab, is particularly grotesque.
I know one thing as a father and stepfather. I want my son and stepson to turn out like Mark Kelly, not Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. I don’t want them to be sexual abusers, drunks, liars, degenerates, extremists, or the lowest specks of microscopic filth ever examined up close.
I want them to be men.
I want them to be men like Mark Kelly.
Pete Hegseth’s threat is an abuse of power and an attempt to stifle speech and debate about what is happening in the US Military on the watch of Champagne Pete.
Total and absolute chaos.
The threats to recall Trump critics, including retired flag officers to active duty for criticizing Trump in their civilian life, is very real.
It has stifled criticism and many retired generals believe this could happen.
Tragically, there is not one of them who has had the guts to speak out and dare Donald Trump to court martial them for doing so.
They would be acquitted — just like Mark Kelly would be — but that is not the point.
The point at hand is very simple.
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are the two most incompetent, sleazy, immoral, feckless and unworthy men to ever command the US Military. Saying so is patriotic because they are a danger, and the danger is real.
Nobody in America should be afraid of speaking out against these people.
In fact, it is a moral imperative.
Winston Churchill once said to the Nazis:
You do your worst and we shall do our best.
That about sums it up.
Senator Mark Kelly isn’t a perfect senator, but he has the right stuff. Pete Hegseth absolutely does not. Neither does Trump.
The best are facing the worst again, and we must all pick sides.
With which side will you stand?
The best will stand with this flag:
The worst with this one:
In fact, they will keep trampling it until we make them stop.
Goose and gander… Someday soon, when this crap show is over and normalcy has returned, and Hegseth is no longer in his position, let's return him to the military to face court martial for his act against the constitution and the rule of law.
I worry less about Hegseth than I worry about the people around us who have placed such people at the apogee of our power.
In North Carolina, people elected a man decisively who said gay people were filth. In Tennessee, the female vote delivered a win for a woman opposed to The Violence Against Women Act.
I remain flabbergasted by such men and women, many of whom are neighbors.