It's up to us
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is the shameful leader of the US Armed Forces.
He is a Christian nationalist degenerate, who would be deemed unfit to serve as an enlisted submariner — let alone an officer — because of his well-documented misconduct. That misconduct includes allegations of rape, excessive drinking and strong inferences of domestic violence.
His tenure is a desecration, and his confirmation an abdication.
The US Senate has made clear that it is feckless and broken as the institution envisioned by the founders. It has ceased functioning like a shattered glass has ceased functioning when it lays shattered on the floor.
This is the fundamental legacy of Mitch McConnell, the morally decrepit leader of the Senate Republicans for 18 years: he was unable to muster one fellow senator to follow his too little and too late act of nothingness.
He enriched himself, and his staff enriched themselves. They are an honor roll of DC lobbyists, foreign agents and scumbags who sustained an economy of taking, while being celebrated as political geniuses by the corrupt access media, who traded information like Mitch dealt favors.
So there it was that Mitch stood alone in the US Senate.
Surprise!!!!
He would vote against Pete Hegseth.
I guess the only question left is for America’s corrupt news editors at the leading purveyors of access media drivel whether it was an act of courage or genius, or both.
The only person who stood with Mitch as an equal in the moment of disgrace was the buffoonish and ineffectual Chuck Schumer who is weak, soft and utterly useless in this moment when an opposition with grit is badly needed. There were many things Schumer could have made clear privately that he was prepared to do to raise the price on a Hegseth vote to make it completely unbearable.
He did nothing. He is a Neville Chamberlain from Brooklyn. The single most important crisis facing Democrats in this precise second is that, once again two years from now, Senate Democrats will lose races that could have been won, but will not, because of the abject incompetence and ineffectiveness of the hundreds of millions of dollars in political spending controlled by Schumer and his lieutenant JB Porsche, who runs the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee. There are no words to describe how bad their efforts have been, and how terrible are the ads they produce.
It would be as equally effective if he took the $300,000,000.00 they spent in 2024, and lit it on fire in a field. No Democratic donor, particularly if you live in California, should send a penny to any DEMOCRATIC PARTY POLITICAL COMMITTEE IN WASHINGTON, DC, UNTIL THEY ARE CLEANED UP.
Starve them.
Yesterday, I told my son that an institution headed by Pete Hegseth is unworthy of his service and sacrifice.
It is with a heavy heart that I would say to every parent and every young person in the United States that the American Armed Forces are unworthy of their service and their sacrifice in this low moment.
I do not trust the leadership of the Department of Defense, and neither should you.
Let us dispense with the notion that the officer class of the United States Armed Forces is filled with Templar Knights. The people who rise to the top are often careerists and ass-kissers, not iconoclasts and problem-solvers.
The line of senior brass willing to lay down their careers to stop illegal anythings at the Pentagon will turn out to be as long as the one around the Pentagon.
Mostly, they will capitulate to their new master, who is unlike the old commanders in chief because the new one couldn’t be more indifferent about the average soldier, sailor, airmen and marine — or the US Constitution that they pledged to defend.
Let me tell you a story about the Oval Office, and the power of an American president to act for all of us.
Michael Gerson served his country as an assistant to George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States of America.
During his service, Gerson played an outsized role in conceiving and realizing the greatest humanitarian achievement in world history: President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). It has saved more than 26 million lives from the AIDS virus.
Think about that.
Twenty-six million human lives.
Saved.
Saved by you.
Saved by us.
The people of the United States of America.
We did that. We saved 26 million human beings from AIDS in Africa this century.
This was a good thing, and it belongs to all of us.
PEPFAR, the greatest gift to humanity ever offered by the people of the United States, is about to be choked off by MAGA cruelty for no reason at all, other than its goodness.
That’s what happens when politics is stripped of grace and decency. It is what happens before the darkness falls.
Maybe this is what the Bishop Budde was talking about?
All over the world, there are American patriots working to make humanity better in some form or fashion.
Somewhere, in small poor villages all over the world, there were Americans and American dollars there saying, “We are here to help.”
In an instant — with the strike of a pen — the message has changed.
F*@k you! We’re leaving! MAGA.
My friends, America will not be made great by an increase of suffering in the world.
The question isn’t whether there is goodness all around us.
There is.
The question is whether the American people will muster the strength to defend it.
The hour is growing late.
Don’t look to Washington politicians and the magic letter “D” to rescue us from this debacle.
It’s up to us.
Our priest, who is from Poland, gave a homily today. He was prophetic. He told us, in so many words, that our leadership is morally bankrupt and that we aught to hold our line as Christians.
The MAGA plan is grotesque.
I oppose every letter of it.
“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny”
— Thomas Jefferson (attributed)