Hegseth Is Losing Our Religions

Secretary of War Sociopathy Pete Hegseth decided over the past weekend to screw over the First Amendment and the faith of our troops (via Sarah Posner at Talking Points Memo): 

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), an ardent Trump loyalist, recently got a taste of what it’s like to be a disfavored religion in the Christian nationalist world of MAGA. He was triggered by the news, broken by the defense news site Military.com, that the Pentagon had eliminated 180 recognized religious faiths in order to “streamline the DoW [sic] collection of religious preferences collection [sic] for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” The Pentagon’s new list of what it calls Religious Affiliation Codes classified a number of religions, like Methodists and Baptists, as Christian. But Lee’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was not listed among the “Christian” faiths. He demanded — on X, of course, because United States Senators have no other means of either commanding attention or acquiring information — “why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches...”

It’s hard to imagine why such a new classification system was even necessary, other than being another step in Hegseth’s march to his personal brand of Christian supremacy. Hegseth reportedly insisted on whittling the list down because the number of religions practiced by members of the military had “ballooned” to over 200 religions and needed to be reduced to an apparently very arbitrary 31. The new list omits, among others, atheists and Unitarian Universalists. In announcing the revised, Lee-approved list, the Pentagon wrote on X that “the Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.” 

As a (lapsed) Unitarian, I'm actually not surprised Hegseth and his wingnut ilk would erase a rather liberal creed from their sight. What is shocking is how these extreme Christianists are shoving all the other faiths into the broom closet of despair (via Dan K at Daily Kos):

But there is a larger point here that I think is being missed: Hegseth and the fundamentalists behind him are redefining religion in general – Christian vs. everybody else – and also trying to control who gets to be a Christian.

It’s more than just the Mormons. While, for the time being at least, Hegseth is willing to allow Catholics (who are 20% of the country, including the vice president and the secretary of state) to be counted as Christians, I wonder how long that will last given that Hegseth has been labelled an “anti-Catholic bigot” by GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, a bigotry on full display this past Good Friday, when Hegseth held a Protestant-Only Religious Service at the Pentagon...

This latest movement by Hegseth the Indefensible is more than an attack on the non-religious, the less religious, the wrong religious. It’s the next move in a plan to define and limit Christianity to the fundamentalist Christian Nationalist version that many of us have been warning about for decades.

Among the many other dangers this presents is this one: No matter how incompetent Hegseth is, no matter how much he destroys the morale of our military, no matter how careless he is on national security, no matter how openly he wastes our money, no matter how often he rejects competent officers for promotion because they are the wrong color or the wrong gender, trump will not fire him – because the forces backing Hegseth constitute too much of trump’s base. They want Hegseth to do exactly what he is doing: ruin the military as an effective fighting force for democracy while turning it into a weapon for Christian Nationalism, fundamentalist Protestant version.

These Christian Nationalists have been calling on a massive holy war - trying to force a crusade against jihadists (and every other non-Christian creed) - ever since the 1970s when the Religious Right became a major component of the Republican Party. They've been keen on turning an actual armed forces into a Christianist army to send on Crusade, happy about the attempts post-9/11 to overthrow Saddam in Iraq and trigger wars across the Middle East to bring about their Apocalypse.

Hegseth is now in a position to give those wingnuts what they want: Using this revamped (and inaccurate) classification system to deny promotions to those the extremist evangelical faiths deem un-Christian, and ensure the rank and file are THEIR faithful and no one else's.

This will turn dangerous: Not only putting in charge any number of colonels and generals driven by religious dogma happy to shoot first and let God sort them out; but also gutting our military numbers to where our nation won't be able to field enough troops to be effective on the battlefield (or in the logistical supply chains). The quantity and quality of our armed forces are going to take a serious hit.

How many Catholics and Mormons and Greek Orthodox and Coptics and Lutherans and Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Jews and Muslims and Hindu and even Unitarians are already serving in the military about to get penalized for not being Evangelicals? How quickly will our armed forces get depleted of competent, trained officers and enlisteds?

All because of one minor sect of Christianity suffering the delusions of vanity and glory.

Gods (literally) help us.

Our Military Implosion

Update: Thank you Batocchio for providing another link at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning. As the attacks on Iran seem to be intensifying this morning (April 7th) into full-scale genocide, please everyone stay safe but please also keep standing against this stupid, globally destructive war. 

Also Update: Just posted my thoughts this morning (April 7th) about our slide into genocide. Goddamn trump and every idiot who supported him.

The damage being done to our nation's military - not by our enemies but by our own leaders - in the middle of a goddamn war is a straight-up nightmare (via Tom Nichols at the Atlantic): 

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Firing the Army chaplain in particular is a hell of a move, something that's never happened before, and allegedly by someone in Hegseth who claims to be of Christian faith. A little more on that later.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

This is where firing the Army Chaplain becomes an issue, because Green - guess what - is Black. Hegseth didn't see the man's qualifications as a preacher or an officer: all he saw was a "Woke" hire and let his racist world-view push Green out the door.

Making this all worse is how Hegseth - fulfilling trump's own dark hatreds - is clearly attempting to redesign our prestigious armed forces to reflect his own recklessness, viciousness, and disdain for others.

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also canceled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.)

...Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

Instead of maintaining a military that spent decades developing a genuine system of merit based on qualifications and understanding of how things work, Hegseth is switching that out for a system openly based on toadying, ego-stroking, and posturing. Granted, some of that does happen in any organization, but at least the Defense Dept. tried to keep that on the down-low to avoid incompetency blowing everything up. Hegseth wants that as Standard Operating Procedure.

And while the U.S. military has a rather scary history of religious fervor among the ranks, they've tried to keep it moderated and leveled out between the various faiths (and among different Christian beliefs). Hegseth doesn't care about that: He's openly pushing the Christianist evangelical platform of Holy War in a way we've never seen from our political leadership in previous wars (not even during the GWOT versus the Taliban and Iraqi Sunnis). Today, a major scandal erupted when he staged a Good Friday prayer service... that failed to invite the Catholics - a world church currently criticizing the unjust war against Iran - to one of their major holy days (from Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost):

The Pentagon has invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel. Except it’s only for Protestants, not Catholics.

“Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel,” reads a Friday email sent by Air Force leadership, a copy of which was shared by an employee.

“I guess so the Catholics know their kind ain’t welcome,” said this employee, who requested anonymity to speak about internal communications. “It’s so ridiculous.”

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed it is not hosting another, separate religious service for Catholic employees.

I'm Unitarian, and even I know - well, I have my ex-Catholic dad as a source - that Good Friday is one of the Big Ones, especially where they perform the Stations of the Cross. Even the Pope does it (well, when he's young enough to handle carrying the heavy crucifix). To exclude the Catholics from a Good Friday service - even one meant for Protestant service - is a huge insult to that church. Considering how many Catholics are in the U.S. armed forces (roughly 1.8 million Americans in uniform or families or base employment) this could well have serious effects on morale.

And as Nichols noted earlier, Hegseth is clearly waging a war on women in the military, allowing sexism to affect the chain of command. He's risking our armed forces at the worst possible time for the dumbest (and selfish) reasons (from Edith Olmstead at the New Republic):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rampant racism and sexism extend further than we previously knew.

Hegseth has made efforts to block or delay the promotion of more than one dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marines, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process who spoke with NBC News.

“There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth,” one of the U.S. officials told NBC News...

The apparent reasons to block these promotions varied but seemed to have nothing to do with conduct—more with the identities of the officers and what they represented to Hegseth.

These are qualified officers: People who have served in the military for decades, who know how things work and how to get the best out of the personnel under their commands. Hegseth is kicking out people who know their jobs, all because Hegseth doesn't know his own job.

This ongoing war - not just the war in Iran, and South America; but the Culture War against America's move towards social justice - is going to get worse, and it's not going to end until these goddamn wingnuts from the Far Right are out of power forever. Pray for that.

trump and Republicans Starting Fights They Can't Finish

I'm not an expert on war, so I try to look for those who are to get insight on how things are going once a moron starts an oil war against Iran. I found this assistant professor - Bret Devereaux - at North Carolina State who provides some input: 

I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.

Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples...

Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.

Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.

In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal...

But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses...

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.

In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.

trump - thinking entirely in terms of individual power, projecting his own desire to be an autocrat onto other world leaders - totally believed a decapitation strike would work and everybody else would clean up his mess. And like anyone who's ever bankrupted a casino - which is almost nobody else because trump is the only one to ever do that multiple times - trump had no ideas what the odds were and what the costs would be.

The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.

As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse...

Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.

The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.

And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.

And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.

Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the Strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the Strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.

Except trump and Hegseth and Rubio and others in that broken, inept White House. None of them even read a Cliff Notes version of Clausewitz's writings, and jumped headlong into a fight without knowing who it was they're really fighting, the terrain they're fighting in, and the reason for fighting in the first place. It wasn't just that they were fools and rushed in: They were morons who rushed in without a goddamn clue.

If you read through - I recommend you do - the rest of Devereaux's thesis, he goes into the probabilities of escalation, the likelihood of U.S. naval vessels getting sunk by an Iranian military that's been planning this kind of war for 40 years, and a continuation of global economic chaos that augurs poorly for our nation. Our own military is struggling with military equipment build-up. The Defense Department is so wary of falling recruitment numbers that they're upping the maximum age of enlistments for guys in their 40s and scrapping restrictions on marijuana users. Talk about enacting the draft is making the 20-something MAGA crowds angry at trump, which could trigger a schism in the wingnut ranks.

We're heading into a regional Middle Eastern war again, with fewer exit ramp possibilities and almost no chance for victory.

All because too many media pundits accused the Democrats of being more war-hungry than trump and a rabid Republican base that's been starting wars since the 1980s and doing a piss-poor job of finishing them. No, I am never going to forgive those media assholes for that.

What I think is going to happen? This war will get out of control: Because trump doesn't know any better; and because Iran knows they don't have to beat the US, they just have to outlast trump and his handlers even if that takes another decade.

Gods help us, the ones who didn't want this war at all.

How Can Our Own Military Be Running Out of Ammo?

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this article at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! And did Italy just beat the US in baseball this week???

As much as the ongoing deaths of civilians and soldiers horrify me as trump pushes the United States into more bombings and more war with more nations, another thing irking me is the revelation that our military is woefully unprepared for most of this, especially in terms of supplies. Susie Madrak over at Crooks & Liars has the details:

Inside the Pentagon, there was deepening concern Sunday that the Iran conflict could spiral out of control, said people familiar with the situation. “The mood here is intense and paranoid,” one person said.

Senior leaders are worried that the fighting will extend for weeks, further stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles.

“I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles,” one source added, noting that it often takes two or three air defense interceptors to ensure that an incoming missile is stopped.

The president’s senior military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, warned the White House last week that munitions shortfalls and a lack of broad military support from other U.S. allies would raise the risk to any operation in Iran and to the U.S. personnel put in harm’s way.

Granted, the government under Biden has been shipping out a lot of reserve firepower to places like Ukraine, but our own military should have been stockpiling newer gear, ammo, defense systems, tanks, planes, helicopters, and other equipment to fill that void. 

I went digging for information about what's going on with our military manufacturing, and by the looks of it there's hundreds of billions of dollars getting pumped into all that (via Jake Kaufman at Defense and Munitions, a trade magazine):

The President’s FY ’26 National Defense Budget requests $1.01 trillion, a 13% increase from 2025. However, at the moment, Congress has passed $831.5 billion for the Department of War’s Defense's discretionary budget. Outstanding budget considerations going through Congress could bring that final number up toward $893 billion...

You would think $893 billion would pay for a lot of bullets...

The budget includes an additional $1.3 billion for industrial-based supply chain improvements and an additional $2.5 billion for missiles and munitions production expansion. The budget also includes significant new investments of $200 million for automation and artificial intelligence (AI). It breaks down to shipbuilding, munitions and defense supply chains, and air and missile defense alone accounting for 50% of the total enhancements...

So the money is there - you would think - for a lot of weapons production and resources getting shipped out to our armed forces. And yet, we're getting warning signs from our own Pentagon officials that things are amiss, that they're not getting all these weapons and material to fight the wars they're being asked to fight.

This is a serious question: Just where the hell is all our defense spending going to these corporations that are supposed to be manufacturing all this shit? What happened to all the resources that are supposed to be pouring into our munitions factories to pump out the missiles and bullets and body armor and helmets and battlefield supplies?

Where's the fucking money, Lockheed Martin???

General Disarray Heading Into October

My paranoia about this next stunt by trump and his lackeys is getting the worst of me this week (via Steve Inskeep and Tom Bowman at NPR):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called top military officials from around the world to a meeting in Virginia (this Tuesday). The reason for this unusual gathering isn't known.

INSKEEP: How much do you know?

BOWMAN: Well, again, not too much. We're talking hundreds of generals and admirals who will meet on Tuesday at Marine Base Quantico just outside Washington. The Washington Post was the first to report on this meeting. In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, quote, "the secretary of war will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week." And he was using the term secretary of war, which both President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth prefer, instead of defense secretary.

INSKEEP: Have you heard of a meeting like this ever in your decades covering the Pentagon?

BOWMAN: No, absolutely not. This is - on this scale, never. At times, you know, they'll bring in combatant commanders - those who oversee military operations around the world - bring them to the Pentagon for annual meetings. But this is far different in the numbers. Now, Secretary Hegseth has talked about reducing the number of admirals and generals - who stand at more than 800 - reducing that number by 20%. And he talked about that during his confirmation hearing and also put out a video statement back in May once again referring to this...

The rumor mill right after that notification spun in a number of directions, especially at the possibility Hegseth was going to stage a public purge among the flag officers to put the Fear of trump in those remaining. Military analysts believe it's tied into the projected National Defense Strategy where trump's administration will reportedly shift the military focus to "homeland security" meaning "arresting immigrants and civilians - maybe even killing them - on Stephen Miller's whims." 

It later got out that Hegseth plans to give a "motivational speech" about the "warrior ethos" he wants to see in our armed forces: He wants to see more rah-rah blood knight enthusiasm towards committing war crimes "being warriors" wherever the battlefield is set.

Throw into this the last-minute announcement that trump himself is going to attend this "lecture" and a clearer understanding emerges: This is going to be a goddamn staged spectacle of the crassest kind.

As a lot of observers are noting, this whole thing could have been an email. Tom Nichols over at the Atlantic is noticeably vexed:

...I was not, however, a senior officer in charge of a major command, with responsibility for thousands of people and millions of dollars of weaponry. Those folks are busy, which is why the DOD has very advanced—and very expensive—teleconferencing equipment designed to obviate the need to move people around the world for a chat.

But Secretary of Defense/War/Lethality Pete Hegseth isn’t going to use that technology. Instead, he recently decided that some 800 generals and admirals needed to come, in person, from every corner of the planet to a Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, reportedly to listen to their boss, a former TV host, lecture them on the “warrior ethos”—and, for some reason, personal grooming. The Tuesday meeting will feature not only Hegseth but also a last-minute addition: the commander in chief himself.

Hegseth has had a lot of bad ideas, but this one is disruptive and even somewhat dangerous. All of these men and women have real jobs they should be doing. Even if Hegseth is calling this meeting to discuss serious issues of national defense—and so far, the Pentagon has given no such indications—few things are important enough to justify the security risk of putting the entire top U.S. military command, the secretary of defense, and the president all in the same room.

It is possible, of course, that Hegseth is convening this jamboree because something genuinely terrible is afoot. Perhaps he wants all of America’s top officers in the same room when he tells them, for example, that the United States is on the brink of going to war, or that the Pentagon has been deeply compromised by spies and all of our military secrets are now in Moscow or Beijing. But if America is heading into a crisis, then Hegseth’s call for a meeting is even more irresponsible, because in a time of danger all these people should be at their posts, not in an auditorium in Virginia.

The other rumors spinning out there cover some of the fears Nichols points to, especially the part about going to war to serve trump's growing rage towards the rest of the world that won't give him a Peace Prize. There's been a lot of saber-rattling towards Venezuela, especially the unjustified attacks on various boats in international waters that trump's administration keeps claiming were smuggling drugs (but which they also refuse to present evidence to back those claims). trump has been public in his demands to go to literal war against drug cartels, refusing to recognize how that would violate other nations' integrity, and arguably dragging the United States into yet another quagmire that would waste lives and money and end up changing nothing.

No matter what this speech will bring, it's also happening on the eve of yet another Republican-backed government shutdown that's scheduled to implode once October 1st clocks in. Just the logistics of bringing in every general and admiral to one location is a headache: Just imagine what those officers are going to go through if the money isn't there for their transportation back to their command posts? This is another reason why people fear this meeting is going to be a purge, with the shutdown as an excuse to gut the military of its leadership.

Every foreign power aligned against us - not only China and Iran but also Russia (so eager to watch a rival superpower collapse into civil war) - have got to be laughing at the United States tonight, and drawing up a number of plans to cause chaos while our military leaders are stuck in an auditorium listening to maniacs scream at them and demand utter obedience. 

No matter what, this is not going to be a fun week.

Brief Thoughts About Hegseth's Craven Urge to Rename the Department of Defense

Update: Thanks again to Steve In Manhattan for including my blog on the Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. 

P.S. I am noticing an insane uptick in visits to my blog even though I can't see where the traffic is coming from. I'm worried the new traffic is coming from AI vacuuming up all Internet content. Anyone got suggestions on how to block that AI? Please comment below or skeet me at Bluesky @paulwartenberg.bsky.social

Hegseth and trump - and other chickenhawk Republicans - want to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War mostly because the Ministry of Peace (MiniPax) was already copyrighted.

As Tom Nichols at the Altantic notes, this is all ego-stroking and a waste of time (paywalled):

Last month, when the plan was still just a hypothetical, the president was asked why he favored it. He said that Department of War “just sounded better” and that it would be a callback to the name under which U.S. forces fought in the two world wars. But the change is also a reflection of how much Trump and Secretary of Defense (his title for now) Pete Hegseth think of themselves as tough guys, real fighters who will no longer trifle with silly names about “defending” things. Hegseth in particular is obsessed with “warfighters”—a clunky Pentagon term that’s been around for far too long—who will engage in “warfighting” with great “lethality.”

Both men seem to think that wimps cower and defend, but real men go on the offensive and whack the bad guys...

It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history...

These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.

Defense is a serious job for a nation to uphold, and these clowns can't accept it. Gods help us.

Update: Ron Filipkowski knows exactly why Hegseth is so giddy about being a warmonger.

And there it is …

[image or embed]

— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) September 5, 2025 at 6:09 PM

We are being led by five-year-olds eager to throw punches at the world and making us take the body blows. Considering the recent violation of international waters and the ongoing harassment of nations over tariffs and bullying Denmark over Greenland, we're going to be in a shooting war sooner rather than later. And the US military is going to get mismanaged into disaster after disaster.

I keep saying this: We are royally fucking screwed. 

The Bleak Parade

Just as donald Shitgibbon trump ruined January 6th in my mind, the bastard is going to ruin June 14th on a personal level as well. 

Where June 14th is officially Flag Day for the United States and the anniversary of the official formation of the Continental Army that evolved into the US Armed Forces 250 years later, it also happens to be trump's birthday.

So we're getting the unwarranted - and in some ways offensive - spectacle of a military parade in front of the White House while trump stands there and revels in it.

If this was going to be a celebration of the Army there were better places to host such an event, like Valley Forge or one of the nearby bases, or a memorial held at Arlington National Cemetery. However, trump is not a fan of cemeteries - unless he's the focus of everything - and considering how he keeps dumping on soldiers as "suckers", he's not about to honor the troops with anything when he's too busy honoring himself.

Let Eliot A. Cohen at the Atlantic spell it out for us (paywalled):

The United States Army deserves a celebration, as do the other armed services during their upcoming birthdays. Tens of millions of Americans have passed through the Army’s ranks, and something close to a million have died in the line of duty, while many more were wounded or taken prisoner, or suffered extraordinary hardships. We owe them a lot.

The administration, however, is orchestrating a parade not to honor service, but to celebrate power. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles will tear up the capital’s streets as helicopters thrash overhead. Tough-guy stuff, in other words, designed to show the world that we are, in the much-overused word of the secretary of defense, lethal...

Nor is this hardware relevant to the strategic choices the Trump administration has avowed, leaving Europe and the Middle East and focusing on the Indo-Pacific. Tanks will not persuade China to keep the People’s Liberation Army Navy behind the first island chain. This is about preening for the American public and indulging a kind of juvenile fascination with big, noisy armored vehicles...

If the draft-evading president and disgruntled former National Guard major running the Department of Defense better understood the American military, they would know that by sending National Guardsmen (and now Marines) to deal with riots when neither the governor of the state nor the mayor of the city concerned want them, they are courting danger. They would not promise, as Trump has, the use of “heavy force” against protesters. They would not, in other words, anticipate, almost with glee, the prospect of Americans in uniform shooting their fellow citizens. For that matter, they would know that deploying thousands of military personnel to the southern border disrupts training for war, which they supposedly value highly...

All this so a confirmed draft-dodging felon and sex offender can pretend to be an Alpha Male in front of his lackeys.

At the least, we should expect the roads of Washington DC torn up by the heavy tanks and transports rolling up and down the square (the military's promised they reinforced the roads but I doubt it will help), adding millions of wasted dollars being spent to deploy the troops and equipment this way.

At the worst, I'm dreading how trump could turn this parade into a public call of a military takeover (technically an autoglope) and declaring the Constitution suspended while he orders the entire military to join in with ICE's mass deportation pogroms across our major (mostly Democratic) cities. And attack any protests that rise up against him.

No matter what happens, I am making the rather miniscule - hello, ten readers of this blog! - call to my fellow Americans to avoid this bleak trumpian parade at all costs. Just don't be in Washington DC at all. Don't add to the numbers that trump will try to claim as turnout, make it as deserted as his 2017 inauguration.

There's a ton of other places to be this Saturday. There's these No Kings rallies happening by the by that you can register and attend across every state. If you're in Chicago, Da Pope is hosting a livestream mass as a blatant counterpunch to trump's self-indulgence (although I've heard it's sold out). If you're not inclined to protest or pray, you can always go to the beaches (it's a bit of a drive to Virginia Beach but worth it)

Just remember that this parade isn't honoring our Army, it's not for the troops to display their discipline and training, it's not anything honoring America.

This parade is for trump's vanity and his alone, and it will be as vulgar as he can make it.

Ukraine Punching Russia - And Putin - Where It Hurts

Holy forking shirtballs, this is happening right now in the Russian-Ukrainian War (via Institute for the Study of War): 

Ukrainian cross-border mechanized offensive operations into Kursk Oblast that began on August 6 are continuing as part of a Ukrainian operational effort within Russian territory. ISW will not offer assessments about the intent of this Ukrainian operation in order to avoid compromising Ukrainian operational security. ISW will not make forecasts about what Ukrainian forces might or might not do or where or when they might do it. ISW will continue to map, track, and evaluate operations as they unfold but will not offer insight into Ukrainian planning, tactics, or techniques. ISW is not prepared to map control of terrain within Russia at this time and will instead map observed events associated with the Ukrainian incursion into Russian territory as well the maximalist extent of claims and unverified reports about Ukrainian advances. Maximalist claims and unverified reports about Ukrainian advances within Russia do not represent territory that ISW assesses that Ukrainian forces have seized or control. Inferring predictions about Ukrainian operations from ISW maps and assessments that do not explicitly offer such predictions is inappropriate and not in accord with their intended use.

Since August 6th, Ukraine started a counter-offensive into Russia itself - going into the Kursk Oblast bordering their nation - that has achieved stunning results 48 hours later. Here's a map from the ISW report:

More accurate than Risk, what what.

The fun thing about Kursk? It's the region right between Ukraine and Moscow. 

Where Putin has put Ukraine on the defensive since 2014 - don't forget, this all started with Putin seizing Crimea back then - and then creating a bloodied stalemate along the southeastern part (Donbas) of Ukraine over the last two years, this is the first true military offensive that Ukraine has put together. That counter-offensive in autumn of 2022 that reclaimed most of eastern Ukraine to them only went as far as the Russian border. Now they've crossed that border, and they've exposed a soft underbelly of how fragile Russia's own defensive capabilities are:

Russian milbloggers claimed that small Ukrainian armored groups are advancing further into the Russian rear and bypassing Russian fortifications before engaging Russian forces and then withdrawing from the engagements without attempting to consolidate control over their furthest advances. Russian milbloggers noted that the prevalence of these armored groups is leading to conflicting reporting because Ukrainian forces are able to quickly engage Russian forces near a settlement and then withdraw from the area. Ukrainian forces appear to be able to use these small armored groups to conduct assaults past the engagement line due to the low density of Russian personnel in the border areas of Kursk Oblast. Larger Ukrainian units are reportedly operating in areas of Kursk Oblast closer to the international border and are reportedly consolidating and fortifying some positions...

A lot of this echoes what happened last year when the Wagner mercenary forces mutinied against Putin's mishandling of the war effort. If I can recall what I wrote then:

Throughout this crisis, Russia's own military failed to respond in full against a "turncoat" private army, highlighting the low morale and poor discipline plaguing the regular forces. Prigozhin made faster advancements marching into Russia within 24 hours where it took him and his Wagner brigades over three months to achieve anything at Bakhmut.

It looks like Zelensky and his generals paid attention to what Prigozhin did - before he wimped out, surrendered to Putin, and got himself and others killed on his next plane flight - and realized how vulnerable Russia itself was to a military offensive. With Putin hellbent on seizing as much of Ukraine as possible before he's forced to into any ceasefire - so he can claim all that territory is legally Russia, and maintain a foothold he can use to invade the rest of Ukraine in the future - most of Russia's military might is stuck in the Donbas front lines.

While Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine, they're doing it slowly due to their draining resources. Putin's been able to turn it into a meatgrinder in the hopes of wearing down the defenses and whittle away Ukraine's own limited ammo and armaments. The US and NATO are NOT doing enough to supply Ukraine out of fears of escalation (something frustrating the hell out of policy experts like Adam L. Silverman).

But now it's looking like Ukraine had been intentionally holding back on their arms and armaments the last several months to pull off this Kursk offensive. And it's looking like - at least to this armchair general colonel major okay the highest rank I ever got was library branch manager - the Ukrainians are trying to catch the Russians in a risky Either-Or decision: 

1) Redeploy any and all reserves - especially armored units and air support - away from supporting the Donbas offensives, which would weaken their offensive capabilities and give Ukrainian forces there a chance to punch through their defenses, taking away Putin's land grabs, or

2) Refocus more military effort into Donbas - where Ukrainian defenses are already pitched in and can make it too costly - to take more territory (and force Zelensky to at last relent), and hope that the mostly untrained and undersupplied conscript forces in Russia itself can set up effective defenses to halt any advances that would be politically damaging (like say Ukrainian tanks rolling in plain sight up the Kremlin driveway in Moscow itself) to Putin.

Already three days into the Kursk Offensive, and the Ukrainian forces have beaten back most of the Russian counterattacks with ease. Russia couldn't do any of the heavy defensive fortifications they made in Donbas - you can't place landmines in your own country, after all - and they're relying on recently drafted conscripts - since this April - to work up the nerve to charge into a Ukrainian position. Whatever armored capabilities Russia has, their failures to fight back - at the moment - are highlighting the likelihood Russia's military has almost nothing left to defend with.

If I can go back to Silverman at Balloon Juice for a minute about the current (well, last night) situation regarding all of this:

The more I think about it, the more I think the second answer – that the Ukrainians are trying to demonstrate to the Biden administration, as well everyone else, that the emperor – Putin – has no clothes. That no matter what red lines he declares, no matter what he says he’ll do if they’re breached, such as tactically using nukes during a conventional war, these are just agitprop and hollow threats in order to establish reflexive control over the leaders of his adversaries in order to give himself a preemptive veto in their decision-making process. I also think they have studied Prigozhin’s aborted revolt from a little over a year ago, how Putin personally responded, and how Russia’s military, security services, and law enforcement were unable to do anything to actually stop his Wagner mercenaries. I think they have a very, very, very good understanding of what Russia is not able to do to actually defend itself within its own borders and is exploiting those weaknesses...

There is every likelihood that Ukraine is over-extending their own military with this offensive - after all, they're not making incursions into other Russian oblasts (not yet) - although there are signs they are setting up strong defensive positions at key locations inside Kursk if/when their attack forces need to pull back. Thing is with this operation Ukraine is clearly proving they know what they're doing and how to pull it off, whereas Russia is still swinging blindly to land any punches they think they can make.

Silverman is right in that Zelensky and his government are proving how much of a feeble paper tiger Russia truly is: That past the threat of launching nuclear reprisals, there's nothing left behind Russia except bluster. And even the threat of nukes seems ludicrous because A) Putin dare not use them in Ukraine or Eastern Europe due to literal fallout returning to Russia itself and B) going nuclear against the US and Europe period is basically summoning a full apocalypse out of sheer spite because it will leave all of Earth a radioactive dust-ball.

Biden - and NATO - needs to be doing more for Ukraine. They need more tanks, more ammo, more body armor, more resources. They need more Patriots and anti-missile systems to stop Putin's ongoing attack on civilian populations (the one thing Putin will never stop doing, because he's a genocidal sadist). And Ukraine needs all that yesterday.

Today, Ukraine is kicking ass. The western powers need to pony up to help Ukraine kick Putin's ass tomorrow. And keep aiding Ukraine until Putin and his ilk are all gone from power.

What To Say About Afghanistan In the Aftermath

Me, I'm just a lowly blogger with no direct military, national intelligence, or foreign policy creds.

But I read a number of people on the Intertubes who ARE well-credentialed, and sometimes it's best to just link straight to them to get an idea of 1) what might have happened that led to Afghanistan's government swift fall to the Taliban, and 2) who's accountable for what happened in Afghanistan.

I've quote Adam L. Silverman here before, with his intel analysis and experience that he posts at Balloon Juice, and here he is going into detail about what led up to this past weekend's collapse:

...The agreement negotiated by Ambassador Khalilzad, the Special Representative for Afghan Reconstruction working under the direction of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the direct orders of then President Trump makes the Treaty of Versailles look like strategic genius.

The abject surrender is in part one and sections 2 and 3 of part 3. Part 2, which is the Taliban’s responsibilities as a result of the agreement, are not enforceable by the US once the US and its Coalition allies complete the withdrawal from Afghanistan and because of what the US agreed to in part 1: to never again threaten to use force, use force, or interfere in any way in Afghanistan.

What did the US agree to:

1. Release of Taliban prisoners,

2. Lifting of all sanctions,

3. Complete withdrawal from Afghanistan,

4. To never again threaten to use force, use force, or interfere in any way in Afghanistan

5. To seek positive relations with the Taliban

6. To establish economic reconciliation with the new post occupation Islamic government of Afghanistan...

Essentially, the great deal-maker donald trump traded away an entire pro football roster for the sake of getting a Third Round draft pick to snag the best-available college punter. 

Back to Silverman, who noted that the Afghan President Ghani issued a stand-down order that basically made the nation's military surrender, and also noted strong evidence that the manpower of the Afghan military and police were overstated with no-shows and payroll grifts:

We have four documentable, verifiable reasons for why the Taliban were able to so quickly and easily retake Afghanistan and not a single one of them was the result of something the Biden administration did...

Which leads to the second part of what we need to discuss, and I'd like to link to Stonekettle - whose bio has him with an extensive military background - at his blog Stonekettle Station to quote a few words from his article "Bitter Pill" (you should follow the link to read the article in full. It is bitter and brutal and honest and factual about all the follies our nation's done from Vietnam to now in the name of war):

The ragged American forces left in-country are in full retreat, falling back and back to the airplanes that will maybe get them out of the carnage. No time to destroy their equipment. No time to destroy classified materials. No time to save our allies. No time left but to run. And it's the fall of Saigon all over again. All it needs is a sad Billy Joel ballad and some helicopters being pushed into the sea on the Six-O-Clock news. If Joel was still writing ballads and we still had such a thing as the evening news anyway. 

And it's all Joe Biden's fault.

Yes it is. 

But that's not surprising, is it?

No, that's not surprising at all. 

Because that was the plan...

It enraged Trump that the military experts and the diplomats wouldn't kiss his ass like the rest of his cabinet. Wouldn't do what he wanted, just get out of Afghanistan, quit the war and bring the troops home. You're so smart, Sir! So handsome and brilliant! 

No, instead the military experts told Trump what would happen if we just pulled out. They told him how it would go, just like it's going right now. He didn't care ...until his handlers, Bannon, Miller, maybe Ivanka, told him how it would look. 

It would be a disaster, it would be Saigon, and it would be all on him.

He couldn't keep his promise. 

Now, all presidents learn this. 

All presidents discover pretty quickly that they aren't going to be able to keep their campaign promises. 

It happened to Obama. He promised to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. He couldn't. Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, wouldn't let him. He had to eat it and he did. Obama learned, like the presidents before him, that the political realities of the office are vastly different when you're actually sitting behind the Resolute Desk. 

But not Trump...

But then, Trump lost the election.

Joe Biden won.

Trump lost the White House and Republicans lost the Senate. 

And that's when Donald Trump could finally make good on his promise. 

As soon as it became certain that he would have to leave office, Trump ordered American forces out of Afghanistan. Trump and Pompeo invited the Taliban to Camp David -- not the actual government of Afghanistan and our alleged allies, but the Taliban. And he turned thousands of Taliban prisoners loose, one of which is now the de facto president of Afghanistan...

And now, Joe Biden owns this disaster. 

Because that's how it works. 

I didn't say it was right. I didn't say it was fair, because it most assuredly is not.  I said that's how it is. That's how public perception and politics work. The buck stops at the Resolute Desk and America will remember this as Joe Biden's disaster. 

Trump, with the support of the most radical elements of the Republican party, finally made good on his promise and left Joe Biden holding the bag. 

That was the plan...

If everyone in the mainstream media is mad at Biden (and a lot of them are), that's by their own design. Many pundits do not care for the history or causes of why our foreign invasions/occupations seem to collapse upon themselves, they only care to defend their own world-views ("Here's how I'm right and everyone else is wrong") and place blame on those leaders who fail in their (flawed and partisan) judgment.

If the Republicans are mad at Biden - and that's a fucking given thanks to their decades-long partisan rancor and obstructionism - it's a means to deflect the blame for Afghanistan's failures away from the bastards and warhawks who drove us into that nation in the first place after 9/11: The Republicans don't want the pundits or historians to remember that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld sent in our armed forces without a realistic Exit Strategy; and then fucked up the end game even more by dividing our focus and military strength into a needless occupation of Iraq.

The Republicans are desperate to blame anyone else in order to avoid the blame they truly deserve.

And so here's Joe Biden, who has been tossed this hot potato, this live grenade of an ongoing Afghanistan occupation for the United States closing in on twenty goddamned years, all because NOBODY ELSE sitting in the White House - Bush the Lesser, Obama, trump - wanted to fall on that grenade and end the war, because they all knew it would end like Vietnam with the local bad guys in control and American prestige in tatters (although thanks to that prolonged indecision, our prestige already suffered).

And yet Biden has the courage to fall on that grenade. We ought to recognize that.

In Biden's own words, he did not want to pass this burden onto another generation of men and women in a military already fatigued by decades of fighting. In other moments he's quoted saying "I know my decision will be criticized. But I would rather take that criticism than pass this on to a fifth president," said Biden. “I am the president of the United States, the buck stops with me."

With that, Biden defers to Harry S Truman, a President who made hard choices and stuck by them, even as the public opinion soured and when history proved he made the best possible moves.

These are the things we need to remember when we talk now about Afghanistan.

We also need to act and do what our nation can do to provide sanctuary for the thousands of Afghani civilians and government officials who aided the United States in their desire to rebuild a nation that is no longer safe for them.

The Occupation of Afghanistan is over. The fight to save people is still ongoing.

Posse Incompetence

Over at Balloon Juice, Adam L. Silverman - who does a lot of professional review of military/foreign intelligence and has been aware of trump as a national security threat for some time - sent up a red flare about the bigger red flare just sent up by 10 former Defense Department senior officials (including former Secs of Defense):  

There is no way this letter is put together and then pushed for publication unless someone senior, most likely either senior uniformed personnel (general officers/flag officers) and/or senior executive service personnel at the Department of Defense or one of the Services unless someone got a message out to one or more of their former bosses...

Silverman then quotes the letter (viewed directly through the WaPo link if you can afford to pay the firewall):

As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.

American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.

Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.

As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic...

This is essentially a reminder to the military at large, from the top brass down to the grunts working KP duty - that any attempt by trump to call the armed forces to him and enforce martial law is a big damn HELL NO.

Thing is there is a matter of protocol - tradition, Good Faith as it were - that the military leadership made up of general and admirals cannot publicly criticize the civilian leadership (the Presidency) they answer to. The Joint Chiefs, the ones who work directly with the White House, could arguably go as one onto the major cable networks - even Fox - to make a shared statement aimed against trump's attempts to overturn a legal election. However, that would destroy any future controls a civilian government could hold over our military, which is necessary to keep the United States the democracy it's supposed to be. It would, in some respects even with good intent, come across as a coup against the current government (trump is still in office until January 20), and it would disrupt any authority any future administration - even Biden's - would need to regain the control and trust of our nation's first, second, third, fourth, AND fifth lines of defense (screw the sixth line, Space Force is just an empty office selling marketing merch).

In my lifetime, in the awareness I've had of previous transitions between Presidents and parties - Carter to Reagan, Bush the Elder to Clinton, Clinton to Bush the Lesser, Bush II to Obama, even Obama to trump - I have never seen or read anything from former officials of such key office like the Secretaries of Defense make such a direct plea to the military as a whole about "respecting the electoral process" and avoiding "election disputes (that) would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory."

But something has to be going on behind the scenes for such a letter to go public. The generals and Joint Chiefs may not be able to go public about their concerns, but they can talk in private to their retired colleagues and bosses, and those guys - like Dick "Go Fuck Yourself" Cheney, for God's sake, even HE co-signed this letter - could then go public with these concerns to let someone (cough trump cough) know that illegal use of military power will be resisted.

If trump's been desperately calling state governors to try and nullify the election results, he sure as hell been trying to call the generals and admirals to see about using martial law to suspend everything so trump can stay in power.

January 6 is going to be a chaotic day.

Disrespect Is Everywhere In the World of trump

Over this weekend, no other report about trump has been as damning as Jeffrey Goldberg's article in the Atlantic about trump's consistent disrespect for the men and women of the armed forces. I could quote bits and pieces from it, but you SHOULD go and read the article in full. If I should quote any passage, it's this:

On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.

“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”

We need to remind ourselves that this report of trump's incomprehensibility is actually old news. trump has been disdainful of military service and the people who signed up for it even years before he started campaigning for the Presidency. he's been caught bragging about getting out of the 1960s draft and comparing service in Vietnam to his trying to avoid STDs in the 1980s.

Goldberg's article rehashes the reality of trump's failed trip to honor the fallen of World War I back in 2018. trump's people denied the reports then, but it comes up again with sources confirming trump labeled the Belleau Wood Marines as "losers" and "suckers".

It's been documented that trump views the world as "winners" and "suckers" and that he himself should never be seen as a sucker. The implication there being: the rest of us should be suckers, to his con games.

It's been documented that trump wants everyone else to respect him - and be loyal to the point of sacrifice - but cannot in any way show respect to any of the people who work for him. To any of the people he views as beneath himself. You know, the people he views as suckers.

The warnings are there, have always been there, big red flags getting waved with giant easy-to-read letters printed on the banners screaming "TRUMP IS A SELFISH UNTHINKING MONSTER".

trump keeps showing us his character, a character wallowing in greed and cruelty and vulgar lusts.

None of this is surprising anymore. It just keeps hurting. And hurting. And the pain is not going to stop until trump is gone, gone from power and gone from public view.

Gods help us. We need a Blue Wave this November to wash all trumpian sins away.

How Low Will the trump Shutdown Go Day 25

This just crossed the newswire, regarding how the Republican-backed Shutdown is hurting our American workers (via NBC News):

The nation's 42,000 active-duty Coast Guard members missed their scheduled paycheck Tuesday, as the only military branch to work without pay during the government shutdown.

Because the Coast Guard is under the Department of Homeland Security, it is getting no funding during the shutdown. All other parts of the military are under the still-funded Department of Defense.

Right now I can think of 42,000 families extremely pissed off at trump's obsession to force Congress to pay for his monument to his ego.

And the idea of forming a mess of a Homeland Security Department is starting to bite our own armed forces in the collective ass.

The thing about a partial Shutdown is that the longer it goes the likelier it's going to cut off other parts of the federal government that had been funded but will soon run out of money.

And this Shutdown will NOT end because the Republican leadership - not just trump but also Mitch McConnell may he rot in the deepest pit of Hell with the other traitors - profits from this destruction. This has been the political party obsessed with cutting at the federal system with a fireaxe, whittling it down to where Grover Norquist can drown it in his bathtub, and the Republicans are reveling in watching federal workers struggle to work at jobs that won't pay them and then stumbling out to the streets to beg for food.

This Shutdown won't end until it becomes perfectly clear too many people and too many families are suffering for the nation to ignore, when the workers fight back somehow and in any way they can, and there's nothing left but the tears to count.

And by then, too many will be hurting that didn't deserve any of this.

GODDAMN YOU, REPUBLICANS. Curse your dark empty hearts.

When A Sociopath Calls

As the nation's government collapses into chaos and despair, a brief pause to document how fucked up the whole thing has gotten (David A. Graham at The Atlantic):

Thirteen days after Sergeant La David Johnson was killed in Niger, and a day after Donald Trump boasted about his actions to console grieving families in contrast to his predecessors, the president called Johnson’s family Tuesday night.

It didn’t go well.

Representative Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat, was with widow Myeshia Johnson when Trump called. “She was crying the whole time, and when she hung up the phone, she looked at me and said, ‘He didn’t even remember his name.’ That’s the hurting part,” Wilson told MSNBC.

“He said, ‘Well, I guess you knew’—something to the effect that ‘he knew what he was getting into when he signed up, but I guess it hurts anyway.’ You know, just matter-of-factly, that this is what happens, anyone who is signing up for military duty is signing up to die. That’s the way we interpreted it. It was horrible. It was insensitive. It was absolutely crazy, unnecessary. I was livid.”

I wrote this about the Republicans back in 2014:

The Republican voters - some of whom are genuinely nice in the real world, and hug puppies and feed unicorns whenever possible - have a problem: the Republican Party they're stuck with has the habit of talking and acting like assholes.  There's no other way to describe this behavior...

...How can the American electorate respect or even like a Republican Party that shows no respect to others?  How can there be any empathy or compassion for a political party that isn't even doing a good enough job faking compassion, or any emotions other than spite and hate?

trump's phone call to Johnson's widow echoes back to this problem: That the Republican leadership and the party as a whole simply lacks any empathy or emotional awareness at all...

In trump's case, it is as textbook a case of sociopathy you'll ever see in public. He obsesses over ensuring loyalty, attacks others for political points without even acknowledging his hypocrisy, and shows no respect for anyone he deems beneath him. As Graham noted:

It is not just that Trump claimed, falsely, that his predecessors had insufficiently consoled grieving families of service-members. He also spent most of the last month wrapping himself in the flag while waging a fight with NFL players and other athletes who have kneeled or undertaken other protests during the National Anthem. The athletes say these protests are a way of bringing attention to police violence and racism. But Trump has insisted that the kneeling “has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem.” The president has used his powerful Twitter account to pass along the idea that players who kneel are slighting the American military.

Even as he insists that NFL players are disrespecting the military, Trump did not make any public comment about the deaths in Niger until he was asked about it at a public press conference. Only after this prodding, and his bragging that he called every family he could, did Trump make a call to La David Johnson’s family. And when he did, he botched the call badly enough that he left Johnson’s widow in tears and his mother feeling disrespected. The president cannot be both the foremost patriot and the utmost consoler while at the same time dragging his feet on calls and angering military families.

trump fails at every requirement that the office of the Presidency expects from a leader.

A President needs to be wise, politically savvy, aware of current matters, informed on his administration's actions. We look to a President to be - and I'm going to gender-specific archetypes for this - a Father, or a Brother, or a Son, a Priest, an Educator, a Leader of the Community: in short, a Hero. Someone with charisma and style, a modicum of success, a knowing wink, a glad hand to shake, a dinner table of lively chatter with him as the provider of bon mots and sage advice.

trump is none of these things. His own resume speaks against being a genuine success: relying on the mercy of his father for his business starts, and the mercy of bankruptcy courts to rescue him from failed casinos and condos, and relying on a popular media that can't look away from his excesses and allowed him to revel in that. trump is no priest or teacher, and what he is as a Father or Brother has been clearly lacking in how screwed up his personal life is.

Whatever trump presents of himself as a leader is based on fantasy and lies. His place in the community comes from putting his name in big letters on every ad space he can get. His role in the community is never about serving others, only himself. Even when he shows up at charity events - that he gave no money to - it's all about putting himself at the center of attention, preening for the cameras before stealing off (either figuratively or literally with the charity's money pot).

There is nothing about him that makes trump truly Presidential. he cannot connect on an emotional level to anyone who's not a preening bully like himself.

Expecting trump to make phone calls to grieving families is like expecting Jack the Ripper to send Thank You cards to the British Suffragette movement.

It's just not going to end well. At all.

Trump, Propagating His Character By the Slander

Just remember, Trump has no shame. He can sink as low and vile a human can go all because he doesn't care about anything other than Trump.

How else can we get Trump to respond to the parents of fallen war hero Army Captain Humayun Khan - who died in Iraq (note: I erroneously had this as Afghanistan earlier) warning off his unit from what turned out to be a suicide bomber - by questioning and belittling the parents' grief and rage? (via Ezra Klein at Vox)

...And, yes, the Khan family is Muslim. Under Trump’s proposed policies, they would be innately suspect; had he been president when they immigrated to America, they would’ve been barred from entering, and Humayun Khan never would have served.

"Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery?" Khan asked Trump. "Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one."

Trump responded to Khan’s speech. I don’t know what I expected from Trump. Maybe he would show some gentleness. Maybe he would show some empathy. Maybe he would refuse to comment. Maybe he would attack Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s foreign policy leadership. All of those responses would have been fine.

Trump’s actual response, though, wasn’t fine.

"If you look at his wife, she was standing there," he said, on national television. "She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me."

This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. In an interview with Maureen Dowd, Trump took the same tack. "I’d like to hear his wife say something," he said.

Let’s be very clear about what Trump is doing here: as ABC wrote, he’s suggesting "Khan’s wife didn’t speak because she was forbidden to as a Muslim." This is bullshit. It is flatly, verifiably, false. But that’s almost beside the point.

Trump listened to a speech by the bereaved father of a fallen Muslim soldier and used it to slander the fallen soldier’s family. That was his response. That is his character...

...If you would like to see Ghazala Khan speak, you can do so in this interview she gave to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. As Fallows writes, she breaks down sobbing while speaking of her son. It suggests she let her husband give the DNC speech for a simple reason: she remains overwhelmed by grief...

A sane response to being called out by a grieving family over the death of their child - sons and daughters all - on the battlefield is to express sorrow at their loss, and try to deflect their anger with a reasoned yet compassionate reply.

If Trump had any decency, he could have done as Klein suggested and shown some empathy: "I'm so sorry your son had to die like that." He could have said along the lines of "I would think every American should be proud your son saved lives in sacrifice of his own." Given Trump's political stance, he could have easily gone with "I understand you're upset about my wanting to block Muslims from coming to America as immigrants, but I'm looking at a bigger picture of stopping terrorists who come from radical Islamic regions and I'd like to think we can all work towards something that would be reasonable and fair." THAT would have fit exactly into Trump's messaging and he could have trudged on as uncaring as before.

He did none of that.

Trump's response was to ignore their pain altogether and attempt to mock the culture that the fallen soldier's parents come from. Which wasn't even remotely accurate in the first place.

As Klein notes, Mrs. Khan has a voice and has every right to speak it. She chose not to because she's still in emotional turmoil nearly a decade after her son's death.

This is a mother's burden. I've seen it. Any mother whose child dies before she does carries that, it is a blow to her far worse than any direct wound. Did you watch that speech, Mr. Trump? I could see, everyone I was sitting with at the watch party I went to that night could see it: Mrs. Khan was in pain. Anything she could have said would have come out only as tears.

Trump didn't even respond to Mr. Khan's direct accusation about Trump's lack of understanding the Constitution - which as immigrants Mr. and Mrs. Khan had to study to win their citizenship - which could have been acceptable given the challenge. Instead he went straight to attacking the parents' character.

This is the mark of the Politics of Personal Destruction: You can't attack the message so you attack the messenger. You disqualify your opposite and thus disqualify anything they represent.

Trump is the imposter Junius warned us of centuries ago: "The imposter employs force instead of argument, imposes silence where he cannot convince, and propagates his character by the sword."

Trump employs the stance of the bully: his is a history of lawsuits and attacks even on those who worked for him (that he then refuses to pay fair wages). He openly issues statements of violence and intimidation: "I would really like to punch those guys," "I can shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any voters," and let's include his willingness to pay the legal fees of those who commit acts of violence in his name...

Trump imposes silence: he bans reporters he views as enemies, avoids open and honest debate - he's trying to lie his way out of the scheduled debates vs. Hillary as I type this! - whenever possible, and has openly admitted as President he would rewrite the libel laws to make it easier for him (and not others) to sue the media into quiet submission.

And Trump propagates his character with the sword of slander, slashing and hacking at everyone, critic and supporter alike, without a care in the world.

Gods help us should Trump ever get hold of a real sword like our nation's military and our federal law enforcement.