Numb to incivility

If a G.I.Joe action-figure were brain-damanged, had Nazi tattoos, and came to life to get blackout drunk, you'd have this guy

Every now and then I am reminded of how truly inured our culture has become to a lack of civility and decorum in this, the age of Felon47.

Sometimes it happens just in my daily life encountering people "in the wild," like a couple of Sundays ago with the road rager and the overly-macho softball player, but more often it happens when I'm watching/reading/listening to the news. People, sometimes high-level officials even, think nothing of just oozing hostility and contempt to whomever they're speaking to. With no provocation at all, it's just the default—be belligerent.

What brings this up today is the recent questioning of the idiotic caricature of machismo masquerading as the Secretary of Defense. A reporter asked him quite reasonable questions about the indefensible, pointless, illegal, and wholly counterproductive war with Iran (though the reporter did not use those descriptors), and Secretary Kegstand responded with insults and dismissive doubletalk and ridiculous propaganda. The reporters, sadly, let him do so without pushback.

REPORTER:  You've just mentioned you plan to strike [Iran] hard tonight. If [that includes] hitting bridges and electrical infrastructure, how is that not a war crime? Targeting civilian infrastructure?

HEGSETH: That's precisely the kind of disingenuous question I'm used to from the media, impugning the motives of the folks on our side who are incredibly professional and incredibly effective.

Hegseth goes on to blather about how Iran's military sucks and how they need to "negotiate" with Felon47 and his staff of criminals, but he never addresses the question at all. And the reporter let's him get away with it! The reporter does not say, when Hegseth is done with his word-vomit, "sir, none of that addresses the issue of hitting civilian targets and war crimes," nor anything else of value. He does not say, "there is nothing disingenuous about my question, the US has already bombed water facilities and you've given no indication that you think that was anything other than good targeting." He does not say, "my question has nothing to do with 'folks on our side,' it has to do with decision-making by the Defense Department. You know, the agency you are in charge of."

Hegseth is utterly worthless as a government official. Worse than worthless, he produces negative worth. But this sort of reportage is also worthless. Why the media just parrots this guy and allows him to spout bullshit and hurl insults at them is, to say the least, counterproductive.

Of course, it starts at the top—the alleged President of the United States does exactly the same thing and thus people in positions like SecDef emulate his uncivil behavior, but unacknowledged alcoholic Pete Hegseth seems like the kind of guy who is just this way in every aspect of his life. I can imagine domestic interactions at home, with Mrs. Hegseth asking where he'd like to go for dinner and getting a sneering reply along the lines of "that's exactly the kind of counterfactual question I've come to expect from my wives" (he's on number three).

It's easy to blame the Felon47 regime for this new normal of belligerence. It's accurate to do so, sure, but as with many other aspects of our increasingly dystopian reality, I assign a sizeable share of blame to the American news media. They have accepted and even encouraged the normalizing of this incivility by not calling out the officials who behave in ways that not long ago would have been near-universally unacceptable.

Felon47 has the demeanor of a spoiled toddler, he whines and gripes about anything and everything that doesn't feed his ego, and yet when he abruptly walked out of an interview for Meet the Press last week, hurling insults and demeaning comments to the reporter (female, of course, his favorite sort to insult) and crushing the microphone as he went, that reporter's reaction was to declare that she had since spoken to "the President," excuse his behavior as related to the weather, and come to an agreement to do another interview later on. Epic fail, Meet the Press. Instead, a responsible journalistic follow-up would have been to point out that the things he was upset about being questioned on were more than legitimate topics and that his whiny replies were lies when they were relevant to the topic at all. Treating this sort of thing like it's perfectly acceptable behavior from anyone, let alone someone claiming to be President of the United States, only serves to exacerbate the greater cultural decline into hostility-as-default.

None of this is new info, we've all been living it, it just felt like something I needed to rant about for a few minutes.

Tagged Politics, Pete Hegseth, Culture, Republicans, President VonClownstick, Media, Posted on June 13, 2026 at 9:02PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Better late than never

For three months it has irked me greatly that the mainstream press in this country has treated the continual policy of Felon47 and his cabinet of criminal cruelty to extrajudicially murder Venezuelans (and others?) on the open seas as just another curiosity in the vast mozaic of chaos this alleged president has wrought. Now, after almost 90 people have been murdered by the United States for the offense of being on a boat out of (we think) Venezuela, it's finally getting some traction, but it took ancillary stories to get the media to care.

It took six congressional Democrats distributing a video reminding military personnel that it is their duty, as codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to refuse illegal orders; it took Felon47’s outraged reaction to that video in which he essentially admitted that he wants to issue illegal orders and have them followed; that apparently led to someone telling the Washington Post that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a war crime in the first of these murderous strikes on Venezuelan boats. That what it took to generate any real outrage.

That in itself is maddening, but hey, at least the outrage is starting to spread. Sadly, the outrage is still focused on one egregious element of one incident, the "double-tap" second missile fired to kill two survivors of an initial strike on a boat in September. Because that action is explicitly described by military codes of conduct as a blatantly illegal order that should not be followed—killing the shipwrecked—it's the focus right now. OK, at least it's an entry point to the greater issue. But talking about the killing of the two survivors of a first missile as if it is fundamentally different from the rest of the policy is yet another failure of the American press.

There is no legality—none—to any of the boat strikes. They are all crimes. They are all murders. Getting wrapped up in the nuances of the double-tap strike and Hegseth's alleged order to "kill everybody" as the reason for doing that threatens to justify by implication the rest of the killings. Hegseth and Felon47 insist that they are perfectly  within their rights to conduct these strikes because they are abiding by "the rules of war" in an "armed conflict" with "narco-terrorists" in league with the Venezuelan government. Except those reasons are all bullshit. 

a) The United States is not at war with Venezuela or any other nation. b) There is no armed conflict with these boats—none of the boats took offensive action against US personnel or property. c) The phrase "narco-terrorists" is just a made-up term to stoke propaganda, it makes no sense—the goal of a drug trafficker is to sell drugs, to make money, and instilling terror on their prospective markets is counter to that interest. d) There has been no evidence proffered—zero—as to who or what was even aboard those boats; were they really carrying narcotics? Were they really Venzuelan gang members? Were they affiliated in any way with the Venezuelan government? One thing that is relatively certain is that they were not heading for the United States; none of the boats had that kind of range, particularly if they were laden with a heavy cargo of narcotics. e) Felon47 doesn't give a tinker's damn about drug trafficking—if he did, he wouldn't be pardoning drug kingpins, as he has done repeatedly including just this week—so the entire motivation for the murders is suspect.

Further, drug trafficking, while a serious matter, is not a capital offense. Further still, even if it was a capital offense, it has to be proven in the judicial system before sentence can be carried out. Because, again, it's not a war.

The latest incident that we know about came just yesterday. Hegseth announced on social media that the US "just sunk another narco boat," this time in the eastern Pacific. An official announcement confirmed the strike and noted four deaths, bringing the tally of known  extrajudicial killings—murders—in these operations to 87.

Felon47 and his utterly lawless regime has killed and will kill untold numbers of people, both in the US and around the world; these Venezuelan boats account for only a tiny fraction. Reversals of international aid policies, destruction of public health infrastructure, rollbacks of environmental regulations and incentivizing fossil fuel pollutants, economic oppressions, and poverty-by-intent legislation will be far more deadly in the end. But the in-your-face audacity of just targeting a boat and blowing it up on the open sea because you want to feel like a tough guy is so emblematic of this tyrant and this regime that it should get covered more intently. And with that context: This is outrageous and easy to understand in the moment, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. MAGA is a death cult, even if the members don't know it.

More folks are calling for Pete Hegseth to resign, which is great, but it's insufficient. Pete Hegseth, along with everyone who carried out his illegal orders, should be prosecuted. So, frankly, should the tyrant-in-chief, but John Roberts and his corrupt majority of the Supreme Court decided presidents are above the law. Still, I'd like to see it anyway, bring charges against him and make the Court defend its ruling.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Pete Hegseth, Republicans, Posted on December 5, 2025 at 11:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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