More reasons to impeach

Though I've been preoccupied by baseball playoffs this week, the rest of the world kept on turning and the regime at the White House and their collaborators engaged in yet more fascistic malevolence.

There's too much of it to list, so I'm just going to vent about the incident at Quantico, which was another thing to add to the ever-increasing list of actions President Convicted Felon and his entire regime of gangsters would be impeached and removed for if we had a Congressional majority that respected their oaths of office.

This week the United States Secretary of Defense (that's still the name, no matter what the dude says) Pete Hegseth summoned all of the US military's flag officers to listen to him project his insecurities and cosplay as a tough guy. The SecDef essentially told these generals and admirals to go forth and commit war crimes.

It was a speech that former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele described as "a cross between a political rally and an old Friars Club roast." Hegseth not only disrupted the commands of all of these officers by demanding they give him an in-person audience to hear this inanity, he then fat-shamed them, criticized their grooming habits, encouraged the abuse of new recruits, and implied a blind eye would be turned to future sexual assaults on military bases. He called having to refrain from abuses "walking on eggshells" which shouldn't be anyone's concern. He paid lip service to racially motivated violence and sexual assault "remaining" illegal, but emphasized he wanted "no more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations," which given his own history and predilections can easily be inferred to mean soldiers can do what they want and we won't listen to anyone who is victimized, even if they're fellow soldiers. He said outright that drill sergeants should be allowed to hit their troops. He also implied that officers or enlisted personnel who had been held accountable for various abuses in the past would be essentially pardoned: "At my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable, earnest, or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity," he said.

He decried restrictions on military behavior in the field as well, blasting policies and agreements like the Geneva Convention as "stupid" and declaring that the US military should be ruthless. "We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters."

There was a fair amount of, I will say, honest explanation of why he and President Convicted Felon want to rebrand the Defense Department as the "War Department," all of it chilling. "We have to be prepared for war, not for defense. We're training warriors, not defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend." He might as well call it the "Department of Conquering" or the "Department of Global Bullies."

This cabinet secretary with multiple white supremacist tattoos on his body declared that he wanted the military to be white and male and heterosexual, barely coding his language at all. Referring to ethnic and gender diversity in the services, social justice, environmental concerns, and women in combat roles as "toxic ideological garbage," he declared that "we are done with that shit."  He called the new fitness requirement he wants to implement across the military to be "a gender-neutral age normed male standard," code for "no girls or sissies." He called on anyone in that room that wasn't on board with the fascist administration to resign their commissions. 

Hegseth's pro-abuse and pro-bigotry address was followed by a rambling, oft-incoherent speech by the tyrant-in-chief, who was very disturbed by the lack of adulation the flag officers were showing him. The tyrant told the generals and admirals that some of them would have a "major part" in his plan to essentially incite civil war, that he wanted to turn American cities into "training grounds" for the military, a force that would "straighten out" cities he didn't approve of. "That's a war too," he said, "a war from within."

Interestingly, Hegseth made multiple references to oaths taken to the Constitution and how they should be taken seriously, not once showing the slightest recognition that he and his boss violate such oaths on a daily if not hourly basis.

I've no doubt that there were some in that audience who were fully on board with what they heard, but I hold out some hope that some of them—most of them?—recognized that they were witness to leaders who seek to subvert the nation they swore to protect. I hope that enough of them convene among themselves in the aftermath of this and strategize for how to refuse illegal orders, protect each other from illegal firings, how to exert any influence they might have to promote an impeachment or two or twenty without overstepping their apolitical protocols.

We should fully expect President Convicted Felon to try to lay siege to major American cities in an effort to destroy his political opposition. I wish I could fully expect the military to tell him to fuck off when he does.