What Happened In Quantico

Unfortunately it's not satire.

 

"Donald Trump walked into Quantico Tuesday expecting a rally. He got a funeral.

The generals sat in perfect silence, faces locked in the kind of grim stillness that comes from years of watching idiots talk and choosing not to react. Trump, of course, couldn’t handle it. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he confessed, his voice trembling somewhere between wounded pride and panic. Then came the kicker: “If you want to applaud, you applaud.”

This wasn’t leadership. This was a washed-up Vegas act begging the crowd to clap. The Commander-in-Chief turned into the Clapper-in-Chief, reduced to prodding the nation’s top brass like a sad carnival barker who forgot his punchline.

A campaign rally in uniform.

Instead of strategy, Trump delivered his usual medley of grievances: Barack Obama ruined everything, Joe Biden ruined it twice as hard, and only Donald J. Trump, self-proclaimed “two-term, maybe three-term president” could save America. It was less a military briefing than an episode of The Apprentice: Pentagon Edition.

The generals, trained to withstand battlefield chaos, sat stone-faced through the barrage of nonsense. They have endured artillery fire with more enthusiasm.

Enter Pete Hegseth, America’s Pastor-in-Arms. Trump’s “Secretary of War” took the podium with the intensity of a man who thinks Tom Clancy novels are actual military doctrine. He promised “fire and brimstone,” called for purges of “fat generals,” and announced he wants the next war to look exactly like the Gulf War, because apparently it’s still 1991 and CNN is running that same grainy footage of tanks in the desert.

But Hegseth wasn’t done. He led them in prayer. Yes, prayer. The nation’s top generals, summoned by presidential ego, now folded into a forced altar call like extras at a megachurch revival. The separation of church and state? Obliterated. Constitution? Shredded. Jesus, apparently, is now Commander-in-Chief. Trump can play Vice.

Weakness on parade

Trump likes to brag about firing generals who “aren’t warriors.” But on Tuesday, the real firing squad was silence. Not one clap. Not one cheer. Just the steady hum of contempt vibrating off the brass like feedback from a dead microphone.

These men and women have seen actual combat. They’ve buried soldiers. They’ve lived with the weight of real command. And now they’re expected to cheer for a man who brags about moving “a submarine or two” like it’s a toy in a bathtub, or who lectures about “two N-words” as though nuclear strategy were a stand-up routine.

No wonder they didn’t clap.

The pin-drop presidency

What happened at Quantico wasn’t just awkward. It was diagnostic. Trump’s presidency is a hollow shell propped up by applause, and when the applause disappears, so does he.

And Hegseth? He’s the zealot-in-chief, delivering sermons about war and Christ in equal measure, a man confusing the Book of Revelation with the Pentagon’s operations manual. Together, they make quite the duo: one desperate for claps, the other desperate for amens.

The generals gave them neither.

Instead, they gave silence, the most cutting judgment of all." ~ Michael Jochum

 Jamie O, Political Crack, So Called Liberal Media

A Tale Of Two Big News Stories

Pete Hegseth and Hunter Biden

A recurring phenomenon of the Trump era, those years of hell starting in 2015 that we are still mired in, is the level of outrage aimed at many things that Trump does and many things that Democrats do feel backward. This means that Trump will do something terrible with great consequences, and some Democrat will do something perhaps bad but not near the level of the bad thing Trump did, and the level of outrage in the Great American Discourse will be higher for the Democrat.

The most recent example of this is what happened yesterday when two huge stories dropped – President Biden announcing he will pardon his son Hunter, and a New Yorker article that outlined Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth.

Let’s take a look at the two stories.

President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden, who faced potential jail time on charges related to late tax payments and lying on a federal form about drug use. These charges were widely viewed as politically motivated, targeting Hunter because of his father’s presidency. The charges against him are almost never prosecuted. Criminal tax evasion is especially rare when the defendant has already paid all owed taxes, penalties, and fines. A plea deal that would have resulted in probation was derailed, leaving Hunter at risk of disproportionate punishment for offenses rarely prosecuted on their own. In his pardon statement, Biden decried the selective prosecution as an effort to harm both his son and his presidency, asserting that enough was enough.

Critics argue that the pardon could set a precedent for Donald Trump to justify pardoning his allies, but for those who have lived under a rock in a deep coma for the last 10 years, Trump has already extensively used his pardon power for personal and political reasons, including high-profile figures like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. Historically, political pardons are not unprecedented, as seen with George H.W. Bush’s Iran-Contra pardons and Jimmy Carter’s Vietnam draft evaders’ clemency. Biden’s critics on the right have long used Hunter’s struggles as a tool to attack the president, but Biden’s refusal to sacrifice his son to uphold “norms” that Trump and his allies have repeatedly disregarded reflects a recognition of the political reality. Meanwhile, threats from Trump’s allies to pursue the Biden family underscore the fraught political landscape. If it were to come out that a large part of the motivation for the pardon was Trump’s FBI director pick and his new attorney general pick, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, and their quite open statements about targeting the Biden family with bullshit, I would not be surprised.

As for the Hegseth story, I’ll just let an excerpt from it do the talking:

After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.

 

But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. 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!”

This combination of extremely poor ethics, criminal behavior, and general incompetence should disqualify Hegseth from leading the largest department in the federal government and being in charge of one of the world’s largest militaries. Which is a helluva lot bigger deal than the Hunter Biden pardon, but of course, given how broken our media is, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

CNN has a big headline on their home page that declares “Biden’s pardon of his son gives Trump an opening,” referring to how Trump will now pardon everyone as if he wasn’t already going to do this (I am BEGGING the institutionalists in media and elsewhere, please look around you and realize what is going on…please?).

I won’t give too much grief to Professional Agitator Tom Nichols, who seems to love starting shit whether it’s over the merits of Indian food or pardoning Hunter, both of which he thinks are the worst things ever. But I will call out Professional Bad Takes Haver Jonathan Chait, who had this to say about it:

“Biden chose to prioritize his own feelings over the defense of the country” is something else, even for Chait. I guess a failson addict with no political power is a bigger threat to the nation’s security than an incompetent racist rapist with a history of violence running the Pentagon. Someone please, make it make sense. Well, it’s Jonathan Chait, so I guess it never will.

I can’t wait for Trump to order troops to fire on protestors, kill over 500, and then the next day’s Jonathan Chait headline is “AOC’s criticism of Trump’s protest response stokes division during a trying time.” I hope we do a bit better with our media’s priorities and story sense, but I am not holding my breath.