Classic Soviet artwork pic.twitter.com/bSNI5q3r7p
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 3, 2025
My own first impression was ‘Trump’s military concierge ushers Erik Primce’s private mercenary contractors into America’s citadel’… but of course I;m a cynic.
dump trucks crashing into nitroglycerine plants don't tend to get positive coverage
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 6, 2025 at 4:43 PM
If only the Mad King knew...
"Three sources familiar with the situation said Hegseth misinterpreted discussions with the president about Ukraine policy and aid shipments without elaborating further."
I know! I'm surprised too!— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) May 6, 2025 at 10:38 AM
“Across military Reddit forums and enlisted meme pages, Hegseth has become a regular target of satire, often referred to with nicknames such as "DUI Hire," "Whiskey Leaks" and "Kegseth."”
www.military.com/daily-news/2…— Phil Klay (@philklay.bsky.social) May 6, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth</del>, a former Fox News host and National Guardsman, has attempted to reframe the role of the Pentagon’s top civilian leader during his first months on the job, casting himself as a relatable everyman — “one of the guys.”
Instead of the standard suit and tie, he regularly appears in khaki hiking pants, rolled-up sleeves that reveal tattooed forearms and occasionally a trucker hat emblazoned with an American flag. He often posts videos and photos of himself working out with troops.
But that carefully curated image — so different from past defense secretaries — may not be totally landing with the rank and file. Interviews with service members and a review of hundreds of social media posts on message boards suggest the image the Pentagon chief is trying to project is seen by some as overly manufactured and desperate for affirmation.
“He seems too preoccupied with his personal brand,” one Army captain told Military.com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “This is the ‘vet bro’ Pentagon.”
Across military Reddit forums and enlisted meme pages, Hegseth has become a regular target of satire, often referred to with nicknames such as “DUI Hire,” “Whiskey Leaks” and “Kegseth.” The references allude to past controversies, including alleged alcohol abuse and an incident in which he shared sensitive Yemen attack plan details in an unsecured Signal group chat that included a journalist…
The jabs at and mocking of Hegseth, while not unprecedented for senior military officials, appear unusually persistent and pervasive. Other high-ranking leaders have been the butt of jokes and the target of online irreverence — such as Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer, the Army’s top enlisted leader who was mocked online for his perceived preoccupation with grooming standards — but those moments have tended to fade quickly.
In Hegseth’s case, satire has become part of the daily discourse…
Hegseth also routinely uses the phrase “warfighter” to refer to American troops, a phrase that itself has long been met with eyerolls within the military community, which is known for its signature gallows humor and scoffing at anyone being overly serious…
On The Road – Hildebrand – Aachen and Avignon – Part II
Baud
The military has really fallen since the days of Gomer Pyle.
Baud
Has anyone seen JPL recently?
ETA: Last thread I can find is a month ago.
https://balloon-juice.com/2025/04/03/that-was-quite-a-day/
chrome agnomen
@Baud: makes me long for Tim Conway and Ernest Borgnine.
Princess
Does Hegseth think the US army fights by punching its enemies?
Baud
Those are all A+.
Suzanne
LMMFAO. This is what I really come here for.
Baud
Some people were debating this last night.
West of the Rockies
I’m sure Pete Hagfish looks in the mirror and thinks, “Damn, I’m handsome!” I’m sure the cultists probably agree.
But I find him so off-putting. His vanity and toxicity pours off him like oily rain. Major abuser/creepster vibes. Pure Ugh.
lowtechcyclist
Holy shit, I can’t believe that poster is real!
But per Reddit, it was on the @DODResponse Xitter account at least four days ago. The account seems to be a legit DOD account (“DOD Rapid Response”) which seems largely devoted to the glorification of Pete Hegseth, at least from the 20 xeets, presumably the most recent, that it let me see without logging in. (It wouldn’t let me peruse any further back in time.) And Tom Nichols isn’t easily taken in. So my best guess is that it’s legit.
And not only is it reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda posters, but it’s a pretty stupid one. Whoever he’s holding up his hand against, it’s not the bad guys, who either have his back or are sneaking up on him from behind, neither one of which is a good look. And “100% operational control” sounds more like bureaucrat-speak than anything else. A bureaucrat trying to sound tough.
ETA: And those bad guys wearing masks? Must be ICE agents.
Matt McIrvin
Please. The Soviets employed human beings to paint their propaganda posters.
Princess
@West of the Rockies: Hegseth is such a little man.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Also, why is the military focused on “drugs”?
And the flag doesn’t seem to have enough stars.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I’ve seen SecDef Hairgel referred to as “Kegsbreath” too, which is pretty good.
They Call Me Noni
@Baud: It is also missing a stripe.
Betty Cracker
The escalation between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan is alarming, no?
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
A tad.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Part of the ‘invasion’ that the Alien Enemies Act was invoked against. Duh!
And a stripe too – the bottom stripe should be red.
ETA: Noni got there first!
Matt McIrvin
You know, it occurs to me that the people in most direct danger from AI are kitsch propaganda artists like Jon McNaughton and Ben Garrison. Their stuff was nauseating but it was recognizably the work of a person. But the people who used to pass their work around don’t have enough taste to care about that–they can get the same buzz now by pushing a button. There’s some of that going on on our side too (the otter meme) but it gets pushback.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: that’s communism!
Dave
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah these chuds are lazy enough that I yearn for the solid dependability of genuine Soviet propaganda.
Hegseth is very much of the Vet bro ilk and that is an identity that is mostly reserved for those who are no longer serving. They also have a habit of denigrating the current force as well.
I’m sure he appeals to a portion of the military but not nearly as much as he imagines.
I do wonder if he has any spark if self awareness of how utterly unprepared he is for the role SecDef that gnaws at him some.
I hope so.
Matt McIrvin
@Dave: He’s trying to purge the military of any officers who will oppose him, leaving only those who will follow illegal orders from him when things really get bloody. I can’t get a bead on the extent to which that’s succeeded.
Suzanne
I hate to say that Hegseth reminds me of an airman I dated for a few months, before I met Mr. Suzanne. I remember going to a formal function with him at the AFB and hearing some of the guys he worked with making (what they thought were) funny comments about their “dependents”, aka wives, who were also there. Like, the term “subtweeting” didn’t exist yet, but that’s what they were doing.
Dave
@Matt McIrvin: They are definitely trying for that and like you I am no longer connected enough to the military to have a sense of how successful they are.
Their have to be any number of extremely conservative officers that are offended by this jumped up Vet Bro.
Really I have no idea how any of this of going to play out. Their weakness is glaring but so is their ability to just ignore their weakness as well.
Dave
@Suzanne: Oh he’s very much of a type but he’s also totally stuck there and doesn’t seem to understand how to switch gears.
No idea what’s really going on in the Pentagon nothing good but how not good is a different question.
MazeDancer
Word online is that a 3rd fighter jet has fallen into the ocean.
At 60 million a ker-plunk, that might start to hurt.
prostratedragon
Spying on Greenland
Baud
@MazeDancer:
We need to start talking about fighter jets committing suicide because their ashamed of the current Defense Secretary.
Matt McIrvin
@Dave: Meanwhile, everything the administration is doing erodes the military’s actual ability to fight. Though that is a subtly different thing from their ability to unleash indiscriminate destruction, which also worries me.
Matt McIrvin
@Dave: My mom lives and has lived in areas with many military and three-letter-agency folk, and told me during DOGE’s first sweep of institutional destruction that she thought Trump’s people were going to have to look out for some of the less stable of these guys going feral after being fired.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@West of the Rockies: He’s creepy looking
Dave
@Matt McIrvin: I absolutely will not be surprised if they manage to stumble into a mass casualty military disaster.
Their entire understanding of the world and rejection of information that they don’t like significantly increase the likelihood of such an event.
I’d make a better SecDef than Hegseth if only because I know I have no business in that role.
Lapassionara
@Betty Cracker: I don’t think Trump has any idea what to do about India and Pakistan. Which is probably a good thing, because anything he decided to do would only make matters worse. It is times like these that I really miss Biden.
French Onion Soup
@Matt McIrvin:
The Army of Northern Virginia might take on a whole new meaning.
Matt McIrvin
@Dave: I recall tangling with some of those “vet bro” types back in Facebook days and remember being struck by the extent to which they thought their service in defense of “our freedoms” meant that those freedoms were theirs to dispense or withhold as desired.
Very Starship Troopers. Service guarantees citizenship (and note that in Heinlein’s world, actively serving military could NOT vote).
Dave
@Lapassionara: The biggest saving grace of Trump, and it’s tiny, is that he seems to instinctively understand that he’d be stuck with the responsibility of a military operation goes poorly something he can not abide and so he’s been to this point at least disinclined to be as maximally stupid with the military as he has the potential to be.
MazeDancer
@Baud: Okay, I chuckled. But wonder if tossing pricey jets in the drink is some message trying to be sent by pilots and sailors?
Baud
@MazeDancer:
Dave
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah there was definitely a thread of indoctrination when I served that was like this.
It mostly wasn’t as explicit as the extremely toxic wolf, sheep, sheep dog thing I’ve seen from law enforcement (though that was very popular during the uglier days of Iraq) but it had the same beats and was very Heinlenesque.
Even as an 18 year old idiot it didn’t sit well with me. I very much absorbed the FDR understanding of freedom and duty from my family.
In some sense very successful example of background education because of how instinctively egalitarian I am.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh, yes. At the very least, they want slavish gratitude. Very familiar with this type.
I told the airman that I dated that I didn’t really think of it as “service” unless one was drafted. What he had was “a job”, like everyone else who has “a job”.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Authoritarians are like that with everything. There are no rights for the out group. Only the in group’s grace.
ETA: See the current “dispute” over due process.
mapanghimagsik
Our DUI hire in the propaganda poster is missing his pinkie. Probably lost it in the Bowling Green massacre.
Note: The latest jet is the third — or the second to be lost in 8 days. One was lost earlier (shot down by friendly fire ). Have they considered not buttering the flight deck?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
I haven’t seen them in awhile either. Kent is another
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I think I saw Kent fairly recently.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
rikyrah
@Baud: 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
Definitely terrifying 😨
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
The Audacity of Krope
That’s simply employing a person at a task.
Communism is utopian hogwash. Libertarianism without private property, so only a minor improvement of libertarianism.
Librettist
@Baud:
The shit eating grin on Carney’s face…. Trump was holding up a fist and looking sour, demonstrating how the
fistingmeeting went.JML
@Suzanne: seeing this with cops these days too.
MazeDancer
@Baud: Proving, once again, how indispensable you are to our ongoing education. Did not know the sabotage back story.
Intrigued by how a French word could evolve from wooden shoes, which I had thought were a Dutch thing, I looked it up.
Apparently, before they became style leaders, the French wore wooden shoes, aussi.
And there is a shoe store in Atlanta named Sabot. Don’t know if they automate their records. But, fittingly, their website is broken.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: Apparently Carney as found the way to mock Trump to his face and make Trump think he being complemented.
Carney: “We are increasing our defense spending”
Trump: “Yes to protect against foreign powers”
Carney: “Exactly”
Librettist
Trump has a type. “As seen on teevee.”
Still, I find SECRUMMY not as egregious as making Priebus an ensign. WTF was that about?
Baud
@MazeDancer:
I mean, I assume the writers of Star Trek wouldn’t just make that up.
TONYG
@Princess: Apparently so. Only wimps use “weapons”.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Samantha was always my favorite.
The Audacity of Krope
@Baud: No, but they would pass on an apocryphal story. They would also probably flag it as such. This is probably how I learned the word “apocryphal.”
raven
This was my drill sgt in November 1966, he’d eat this punk alive.
TONYG
Hegseth was born too late. In Vietnam he would have been fragged by his own troops.
danielx
Ongoing shooting between India and Pakistan, very bad news. War breaking out between two nuclear armed states would be a Bad Thing.
Kirk
@MazeDancer: Clogs for the Dutch. Sabot for the French. Pattens for the Germans (well, Prussians and Austrians and such)
eta – to start, mind. Because wooden shoes for outdoor wear were pretty much everywhere.
lowtechcyclist
@MazeDancer:
I think I learned it from reading Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: Yes, that is alarming.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: It was one and the same thing. The bro I’m thinking of was going on about how immigrants have NO legal rights. No rights at all. When challenged he said he was a veteran, he’d been the one to earn us those rights, so his word was what counted.
Timill
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): JPL last commented in thread https://balloon-juice.com/2025/05/01/may-day-open-thread/
Kent last commented in thread https://balloon-juice.com/2025/05/05/monday-morning-open-thread-incoming/
Soprano2
@Baud: This made me laugh out loud, thanks!
Librettist
They “Reagan’d” him up. St. Ronnie was a lot of things, but he was never too drunk to fuck.
RSA
I often come across the term “warfighter” in political or policy contexts. In day to day talk I more commonly hear “Soldier” or “greensuiter”.
Soprano2
@MazeDancer: You must not be a Star Trek fan, because they all know the story from one of the movies.
Betty Cracker
Did anyone read Biden’s BBC interview? Unsurprisingly, he blasted Trump. This part though…
Well, that’s certainly…optimistic.
Soprano2
@raven: My husband hates the “valorization” of the military. He says being in the military doesn’t automatically make you a hero, it’s the things you do that make you a hero.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I kinda liked this:
The Audacity of Krope
Trouble is, a lot of them like it.
ETA: Not really a fan of any framing that suggests Trump isn’t a natural continuation of what Republicans have been doing for decades
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: Waking up to it and being willing to do something about it are two different things. I think they already know what FFOTUS is about, but they’re scared to do anything about it.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
And, as always, I will point out that this is not just asshole veteran behavior, this is toxic masculine behavior. The traditionally male endeavor of fighting is what “earns” one their rights. None of the things that have historically been the endeavors of women (feeding, teaching, nursing), and that have literally kept this veteran alive are considered “rights-earning” in this framework.
This attitude is still alive and well in the manosphere and beyond….. the loathing of college graduates and white-collar workers (“email jobs”) we’re seeing is, of course, really a stalking horse for hatred of women (and to an extent, LGBT people) for making enough money to be financially independent from men, but also because money = status to these people, and it bothers them if women have more.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: If you search for giant cats on aircraft carriers, you will find the memes from all the previous times this happened.
raven
@Soprano2: Indeed, this “hero” shit is way overblown. Sergeant Pinckney was the real deal.
mrmoshpotato
@Princess:
No. He thinks they fight by the Secretary of Defense drinking everyone under the table.
Librettist
A sabot round is a type of munition. They were made with a wooden sleeves back in muzzle loading days.
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: My husband is a USAF veteran and feels the same way. If someone thanks him for his service, he tells them he was a piano player in the Air Force Band in Europe, and it was pretty damn cushy! ;-)
schrodingers_cat
The US embassy in Delhi emailed me a security alert about traveling to Kashmir. I had enrolled in the State Dept STEP program when I was traveling overseas.
SiubhanDuinne
Deleted. Others said my comment faster and better.
karen gail
@MazeDancer:
A US Navy aircraft carrier in the Red Sea fight just lost a third Super Hornet. The $60 million jet went overboard on landing.
The Audacity of Krope
@SiubhanDuinne: We call that artistic liberties. Artistry being a trait commonly ascribed to machines…
Soprano2
I read this article by Amanda Marcotte this morning. It’s about the gendered tariff talking points FFOTUS is using. She thinks it’s deliberate, that it’s a way to message to MAGA about how the tariffs will help put women in the place the manosphere thinks they should be. I think she’s onto something. She thinks this all came from Stephen Miller. A few paragraphs:
mrmoshpotato
@Betty Cracker: LOL!
Soprano2
@The Audacity of Krope: As I have read elsewhere, FFOTUS responded to a Republican casting call. He’s not an aberration, he’s what they’ve been looking for.
The Audacity of Krope
@Soprano2: Without women working, I’m gonna be awfully lonely in the pharmacy.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Back during the early War on Terror era I remember someone noting that the Declaration of Independence describes human rights as endowed by humanity’s “creator”–an attitude that has problems of its own, since religious folk are likely to have very specific ideas about who that creator is and what strings he might have attached. But what it does NOT say is that those rights are endowed by soldiers, or conditional on some national identity, or citizenship status, or even on good behavior. People have them by virtue of existing.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: They are no longer posting on Twitter
But this pic explains it all
Manyakitty
@Betty Cracker: that was excellent
The Audacity of Krope
Misspelled error.
allium
@Baud:
“Only Nixon could go to China.”
– old Vulcan proverb
Manyakitty
@schrodingers_cat: so scary. Hope all your people are safe and well.
Dave
@Suzanne: I admit I occasionally used it when I used to waste time arguing about police shootings. It was fun to respond to the inevitable “yeah well you’ve never been in that situation” with yeah dude only been under fire a few hundred times including not returning fire because we didn’t have PID etc so yeah I do understand and those cops fucked up and the culture that tells them their response was proper is a damaged one.
It was always fun and that dynamic probably played a bit of a role in how online reactionaries began denigrating veterans which wasn’t surprising if you paid attention to what they actually value but was very revealing.
schrodingers_cat
@Manyakitty: Thanks for thinking about me. I don’t know how bad this will get. They are nowhere near Kashmir. But Karachi is very close to Mumbai and during the Bangladesh war there used to be air raid sirens warning locals
ETA: There is also a massive naval base in south Mumbai and my family lives within a few miles of it.
Soprano2
I just read that FFOTUS is going to try to rename the Persian Gulf. Good luck with that.
I think someone has told him that he needs to do something “newsworthy” every day to keep himself constantly on the front pages. You could go days without hearing much at all about Biden, which is how I prefer it, but maybe in this new media environment it’s necessary to do that.
Suzanne
@Soprano2: Cartoons Hate Her had a similar piece a few weeks ago. There’s always been some white-collar/blue-collar tension, but in this generation, it’s really about the social order that has shifted to make space for women to dream about more than marrying a chud. And that has mostly manifested by women going to college and getting jobs commensurate with that.
It’s not just a right-wing thing, either. Plenty of dudes on the left want to pull women back down to their “proper place”.
Matt McIrvin
@Princess: They scream “THIS IS SPARTAAAAA!!” and the other side just runs away
Dave
@Soprano2: It is almost impressive that the rancid stew of propaganda, toxic mores, and a generalized cruel stupidity we’ve managed to elect the sort of “leader” you usually only found in the last days of a decaying inbred degenerate dynasty. And we collectively did it twice.
Not impressive in the good sense mind you but impressive nonetheless.
Kirk
In the production lines I’ve both worked and supervised, women tended to be more reliable employees – both in attendance and in production (quality and quantity). In the majority of lines they also outnumbered men.
Now admittedly all my lines were small product lines, not automotive assembly. Thing is there are a lot more small product assembly lines than large items, AND these days most large/heavy items have machines doing the lifting and moving.
As usual, the world these incels envision are not exactly aligned with reality.
schrodingers_cat
@Dave: We have to thank the master race for that. The only demographic where the Rs are dominant.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: Nobody needs to tell Trump that, it’s second nature to him. He needs to be the center of attention at all times. I think a large part of the reason we got where we are is that during the COVID pandemic, Anthony Fauci was getting mainstream attention and respect that Trump thought he was due. Fauci and everything he represented had to be destroyed.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I will confess that I occasionally yell SPARTAAAAAAAA to Mr. Suzanne (as a joke) when I observe a dude being a dick.
lowtechcyclist
@The Audacity of Krope:
Well, he isn’t. He’s in fact a reversal of that continuity. You know, the Atwater progression, where they start off using the ‘n’ word but then gradually make the racism more and more abstract and subtle and dog-whistly over time.
That was the continuity of what the Republicans were doing up until Trump came along. Trump exploded that – didn’t quite go all the way back to where Atwater started off, but pretty damn close.
In retrospect, a lot of natural GOP supporters weren’t picking up on the dog whistles and as a result they weren’t bothering to vote, but when Trump just blasted out the racism straight up rather than dog-whistling it, they understood that, and showed up.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: Back in the mid-80’s I lived with a guy who resented my college education – he barely graduated from high school but still had a job in the factory where we worked making more money than I did in the office. One of the first things that attracted me to my husband was that he didn’t care about any of that bullshit – he was secure about who he was. I think that’s one reason my sister had such a hard time finding someone that she could stay with – she was educated and highly successful but tended to like the more blue collar type men (I think she was looking for someone like my dad, a highly educated country boy) rather than the professionals in suits. Her environmental services company, EWI, has greatly expanded since her death. She would be really happy about that.
Booger
@RSA: “Warfighter” is interesting because it implicitly includes mercenaries (Blackwater, Constellis, et al) plus front-line U.S. military, but excludes the massive percentage of U.S. military not serving a ‘the tip of the spear.’
Very creepy 1984-ish use of language.
Suzanne
@Kirk: There’s a lot more women working in construction than there used to be, too. Trades like plumbing, finish work, electrical, painting, etc. take much more skill/facility than strength. And, as you say, the work that requires the strength is largely done with tools now. The big GCs don’t want workers comp claims, so there’s been big pushes in that industry to develop “safety culture”.
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Along those lines, from Ankara-based Clash Report:
Canadian tanker: “It’s a Hyundai!”
zhena gogolia
@mapanghimagsik: OMG he’s the villain in The 39 Steps!
karen gail
I remember the words of one veteran; “the real heroes are the ones who never join any veterans groups, they never talk about what they did while in the military, they will down play the physical scars, they sit quietly in the back of room sipping their drink and shaking their heads at those who claim to be heroes.”
I asked another veteran about him, he said; “he claims the scars are from zigging when he should have zagged, but the truth is he is why I am alive.”
Belafon
@Baud: that, or “fallen off” is a cover for “shot down.”
Professor Bigfoot
@The Audacity of Krope: As has been pointed out here on this very blog, Americans* will hate you for pointing these things out.
Ol’ Joe, bless him, is still trying to convince them that they’re better off if they do the Ides of March on their Caesar; so, being the tactful, diplomatic sort…
But I’m with you nonetheless.
If I didn’t trust that old white man… but I do, by the gods, I do.
Melancholy Jaques
@Soprano2:
I think she’s right, but I would add that that is the way they talk about everything.
Melancholy Jaques
@allium:
Because if anyone else went, Nixon would be screaming that they were traitors selling us out to the commies.
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: The demographic that the tariffs will hurt the most is white native born men who voted for Trump. Most of them have never had to do without.
And the demographic that will be most resilient to tariffs will be immigrants. We have to do give up many things that we took for granted when we made the US our home. We know how to use substitutes or do without.
Suzanne
@Soprano2: Your sister sounds awesome.
I dated a few guys who were definitely threatened by my education. One straight told me that I “needed to be taken down a peg”, and I was young and it didn’t dawn on me as fast as it should have what was going on. (He contacted me years later, you know, in that drunk-texting way, and asked if I still thought about him. Uh no.)
It’s definitely worse on the manosphere/incel/MAGA side of the aisle, but left populists engage in it, too. As I have noted many times here before…. there’s a push to devalue college educations (or to oppose student loan forgiveness) when more women and racial minorities are getting those degrees.
Geminid
@Belafon: It would be hard to conceal an F-18 being shot down because there are so many people following these operations. The jet was almost certainly lost the way the Navy says it was, because the arresting gear failed and couldn’t stop the F-18 when it landed.
This could be a matter of wear-and-tear. The Truman has been landing a lot of jets these past few months. The Navy likes to deploy carriers for six months, but the Truman’s deployment is now in its eighth. It left Norfolk September 23.
TONYG
@Booger: “Warfighter” is a childish word from video games (and a Gex-Xer like Hegseth would be just the right age for that). I have zero military experience myself, but my understanding is that at least for the past 80 years most military personnel are support personnel in logistics and supply capacities. Hegseth, that drunken fool, literally does not understand the organization that he pretends to be in charge of.
Dave
@TONYG: It’s part of the ever evolving euphemism treadmill admittedly one that origins in the more chest pounding silly buggers quarters so they can feel manly and whatnot.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: My wife has been pulling in a much higher salary than me for years. Am I OK with that? You bet.
(It’s been the other way around too, and for various random reasons of dumb luck and society-wide sexism, my contribution to the nest egg has been bigger. But other than that she’s the primary breadwinner lately.)
Professor Bigfoot
@lowtechcyclist: I think he’s the endpoint defined by Lee Atwater, because in order to work, the dogwhistles had to get louder and louder until the only way to blow them louder became to trade the dogwhistle for a bullhorn.
But it’s ALWAYS been about white male Christian supremacy.
RevRick
@Princess: You’ve nailed the problem. Hegseth completely, totally, utterly misunderstands how modern military forces function. Only about 15% would do any actual combat. The vast majority are in the “tail.” They supply the food, water, ammunition, fuel to the frontlines. They retrieve and repair damaged equipment. They sit hundreds of miles back controlling drones ( which, incidentally, have reshaped the battlefield). They work with contractors to make sure they produce the needed materials.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Have you ever seen the Ali Wong special “Hard Knock Wife” in which she talks about making more than her husband?
“The only kind of man that would leave a woman who makes more money is the kind of man that doesn’t like FREE MONEY.”
NotMax
Somber anniversary.
On this date 110 years ago the liner Lusitania was sunk.
Belafon
@Kirk: In pictures I’ve seen of auto assembly lines, in the places that require people, heavy items are moved by a mechanical arm that a person controls, and they don’t require personal strength, so the pictures tend to present women frequently.
Belafon
@RevRick: A fully crewed aircraft carrier has 6,000 people on board to support the fighter planes. And that doesn’t include the rest of the battle group.
evodevo
@Dave: Joffrey Baratheon..and he was freely elected. Says a lot about where America is right now…
Radio Dave
@Suzanne:
As a retired veteran and retired VA civil servant, I know this is true and hard agree with you. Axe in the bullseye – Well Thrown!
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: I would expand that to white people in general. You see the fit they threw when they couldn’t find exactly the brand of something they wanted during Covid. There were times I bought whatever cat food was available, because it might be the only bag there! I sure didn’t complain about it.
Bupalos
@Baud: I mostly reconsidered my take there, it’s clear the broader reaction in Canada isn’t the one my UT ex-neocons and I shared. Which in retrospect as I look at the transcript was almost entirely about how it began and ended. The former with Carney thanking Trump for his leadership and praising his defense of the American worker. The latter with Trump reminding Carney of what happened to Zelenskyy and then proceeding to hold the floor unrebutted with the claims about Canada being a U.S. welfare case, referencing his “governor Trudeau” insults, and a claim that Canada would “end” if Trump were to tariff the cars at 25% which he wants to do because “we don’t want cars from Canada.” That entire string at the end set me off, though it clearly did not set off Carney or Canadians generally, and that may well be wise. I saw that as “sit here and take this and don’t make noise like Zelenskyy did” and it seemed that’s what Carney did. Though Trump simply cut off the meeting pretty quickly on that statement.
Directly prior to the Zelenskyy reference, despite saying very few words, Carney did straight up contest Trump’s claim that the trading relationship was insignificant from the point of view of the U.S. Which was basically confrontational and is probably why the Zelenskyy thing came up.
Chris T.
@Suzanne:
I’ve been calling Hegseth a “DUI hire” since Day 1 (of his hiring). Got zero credit for it.
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: Agreed. I didn’t want all valued commenters and FP posters basically the #thenotallww crowd, who have a sad when I say anything about ww to launch another tirade against me.
Bupalos
@schrodingers_cat: Bowen Yang had a pretty good one along these lines posing as the trade representative for China in SNL’s weekend update: “Let’s see, which Country is better to endure hardship for the benefit and glory of their nation, the one that’s been around for thousands of years or the one that’s sending Katy Perry to space?”
Citizen Alan
@lowtechcyclist: i’m pretty sure, I first heard that story almost verbatim from star trek: the undiscovered country.
The Audacity of Krope
@Citizen Alan: Is that the one with the whale song?
TONYG
@RevRick: Yes. And the importance of logistics and supply was highly important even during World War Two, more than 80 years ago. (One of my relatives had been in the Merchant Marine during the Second World War. He never shot at or even saw the enemy, although an unseen enemy submarine sunk his ship one night in the Indian Ocean.) It sounds like Hegseth — like his boss Donald — never grew up. To the extent that Hegseth is thinking at all, he must be thinking about the Battle of Gettysburg or even the Battle of Agincourt.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chris T.:
You’re not a “valued commenter” so that’s why.
Bupalos
@Professor Bigfoot:
@lowtechcyclist:
This is about half of the truth, but the other much more confusing and new half is that the biggest ethnic demographic changes in R/D support since Trump showed up on the scene- and especially lately- are non-whites leaving team D for Trump.
In age demographics, it’s young people leaving D and old people coming in. In economic demographics, it’s less wealthy leaving and more wealthy coming in. And gender, it’s men leaving and women coming in.
TONYG
@Chris T.: You should have copyrighted that joke!
Matt McIrvin
@The Audacity of Krope: It’s the “Chernobyl and end of the Cold War IN SPACE” one.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TONYG:
You’re giving Petey too much credit. I doubt he’s done *any* serious reading on damn near anything military, military history, etc.
I’ve said this before, I was an intel officer for 11 years and a civilian graduate of the USMC Command & Staff College. My wife first worked on Star Wars navy (hated it), then at the Night Vision Lab doing laser sensor development work for the Army (hated it less) before we bailed.
Collectively, we are more qualified to be SecDef than that clown. Just read the annotated Signalgate transcript and it’s clear he’s a complete moran and totally unsuited for the position, even by the so-low-a-bar-you-can-see-the-ground standards of this (mal)Administration.
stinger
@Betty Cracker:
Hah! In my unit (desk jockeys with the 101st Airborne Division) we called ourselves Chairborne Rangers.
Chris T.
@TONYG: Exactly. I always forget to patent/copyright the obvious, thinking it’s too obvious.
Professor Bigfoot
@Geminid: My oldest daughter spent a few years on carriers, wrenching on aeroplanes and here’s a plain and simple truth: it’s fucking dangerous, even peacetime.
Every single time she was on deployment, when I talked to her I said, “baby girl, get as much rest as you can (because they work those kids like rented mules); because tired people make mistakes, and its a dangerous business, what you do.”
I don’t care about the hardware, I care that none of those crew are hurt or killed because they’ve been on deployment for 8 months and their shit is wearing out.
Citizen Alan
@The Audacity of Krope: no, it’s the one with christopher plummer as a klingon general who likes to shout lines from shakespeare at his enemy over the comms in the middle of battle.
Bupalos
@Suzanne: Terror about the future prompting a crazy desire to return to a mythical past that never existed is more prevalent on the right, but not limited to the right.
Suzanne
@Chris T.: Well, I must have missed that. That’s funny as hell.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chris T.:
DUI Hire©
DUI Hire™
You’re welcome. :)
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid:
No chock blocks.
Keith P.
Or Archer
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Kept Man is what I’m aiming for at the moment
The Audacity of Krope
.
Soprano2
@RevRick: My husband told me that when he was in the Army the ratio was 10-1 – ten support soldiers for every one soldier in the field. A lot of that has been contracted out, but I’m sure the ratio is bigger than 1-1.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I think that’s one reason they denigrate the kind of work they think women do (e-mail jobs), because then they can still claim to be superior even if she makes more money.
Matt McIrvin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Hegseth is the outgrowth of all those dweebs passing around recruitment ads for the Russian military and expressing awe at how much more manly they are than our wussified military.
It’s believing that you win wars by having the more macho aesthetics. In advertisements.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soprano2:
The support units are in the field as well a lot of the times.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
Oh yes. 100%
And look how much social energy we are putting into pushing men — but not women — into the trades if they don’t want to go to college. We have shortages of home health aides, preschool teachers, paraprofessionals, and all kinds of other jobs that are really important, don’t require college degrees….. and we’re not encouraging men to take those jobs. Because the work that women do is insulting to them.
RevRick
@Omnes Omnibus: The point I was trying to make is that Hegseth’s imaginary military relying on pure brawn is ridiculous. A lot of the operation of the military requires soft skills, something that is often sorely lacking in young men. A military that embraces DEI isn’t advancing some silly woke agenda. Instead, it recognizes the importance of including a wide range of perspectives and abilities in getting the job done.
Omnes Omnibus
@RevRick: Believe me, I understand that. My point is that a lot of people assume that only the combat arms units get out into the mud and dust. That is not true. Also, at least in armored/heavy units a huge amount of time is spent turning wrenches and filling out forms. Getting out in the field and actually “playing army” is a welcome change in a peacetime army. But all the work before and after does take a little of the fun out of it.
rikyrah
Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext
The latest letter to Harvard makes clear that the administration’s goal is to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.
By Rose Horowitch
The intensely hostile letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to the leadership of Harvard yesterday has a lot going on. But the most notable thing about it is what it leaves out.
To hear McMahon tell it, Harvard is a university on the verge of ruin. (I say McMahon because her signature is at the bottom of the letter, but portions of the document are written in such a distinctive idiolect—“Why is there so much HATE?” the letter asks; it signs off with “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”—that one detects the spirit of a certain uncredited co-author.) She accuses it of admitting students who are contemptuous of America, chastises it for hiring the former blue-city mayors Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot to teach leadership (“like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation”), questions the necessity of its remedial-math program (“Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics?”), and accuses its board chair, Penny Pritzker (“a Democrat operative”), of driving the university to financial ruin, among many other complaints. The upshot is that Harvard should not bother to apply for any new federal funding, because, McMahon declares, “today’s letter marks the end of new grants for the University.”
What you will not find in the McMahon letter is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/05/mcmahon-harvard-letter/682717/
The Audacity of Krope
That captain had a rather prestigious career before…he became permanently unavailable.
Because people who demonstrate academic excellence in one regard are naturally excellent at all things academic.
Do they teach remedial logic?
Belafon
@The Audacity of Krope: The student’s parents should have hired tutors to fix that. /sarc
1,000 flouncing lurkers (was fidelioscabinet)
@Belafon: I’ve seen suggestions it was a problem with the arrestor mechanism—the thing that handles the cable that’s supposed to stop the plane when it lands.
The giant cats are a much cuter but less plausible explanation; even a carrier would be unable to maintain an adequate supply of kibble along with its other supplies for an extended tour.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
Gotta disagree. Atwater:
“By 1968 you can’t say [bleep]—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than [bleep].”
Dogwhistling is the very opposite of yelling with a bullhorn, and dogwhistling was what the GOP had been doing for decades because it had moved away from stuff that could be shouted from a bullhorn. You can’t bullhorn “we want to cut this program” or “we want to institute work requirements.”
They hoped that whites who were less racist (racism is white America’s original sin – it’s there in all of us, but we embrace it to varying degrees) would miss the dog-whistles and vote Republican for strong defense, small government, etc., and could fool themselves that while there might be racists in the GOP, it wasn’t a racist party, while more strongly racist people would pick up on the dog whistles and know the whole point was to keep blacks where they were.
But the dog whistles blew by millions of the most racist whites without connecting at all. And then came Trump who didn’t dog whistle, he didn’t leave any doubt.
No argument there.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Having been a member of the US military long ago I can honestly say that the term 100% operational control is not all that unusual.
The US military speaks – or at least did, in ways that are seldom heard anywhere else. And control is a part of that. 100% control. The business of the military is rather unlike most every other business/group/etc. Except possibly other militaries. Now not everyone, or most everyone didn’t use terms like that, especially in day to day speech, but in official business it was not the type of comment to be unknown/unheard. I imagine that most militaries use similar concepts of speech. It’s part of the game.
Ruckus
@Dave:
Pompous arrogance does not allow for any doubt whatsoever. At least on the outside. But utterly unprepared is only the minimal description of him.
lowtechcyclist
@Citizen Alan:
You may well have. I only watched one of the Star Trek movies, and it wasn’t that one. Abbey wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang in 1975, and I read it in the early 1980s.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Having been in the US military for 3 1/2 years (long story, from long ago, but the then current war had ended was part of it….) this is not really new. My experience was that most lifers were a tad weird, and that tad may be doing a bit of work. Many of the lifers really had nothing to sale as skills – military or not, or to fit in anywhere else. Some were OK, decent human beings – but only some. Some were far worse than one might imagine. Even low level officers didn’t make much of a living wage, and enlisted pay was rather pathetic, even for the time.
My point is that none of what I’m reading about some of these humans surprises me.
Ruckus
@Dave:
I’d make a better SecDef than Hegseth if only because I know I have no business in that role.
I had no business running a department on a US navy ship but it wasn’t because I was unable or unwilling to do so, it was because I actually wanted to be most anywhere else, and not have to deal with (or even know they existed!) most of the lifers and officers. Not all were pure crap – or crap in any way, but way, way too many were. But then it is humanity, with all the levels, from completely insane assholes, all the way up to normal, rational human beings.
Bill Arnold
@Bupalos:
Tx. I read the transcript, and it didn’t appear to align with the impression you were presenting.
Ruckus
@JML:
Some cops have had that attitude for, well ever.
Not all, possibly not even a majority, but more than a few.
Actually I think some go into the business because of that attitude. It works so well – NOT.
Ruckus
@TONYG:
Naw. He’d have been tied up to a tree, naked, a target in mud drawn around his mid section. Possibly upside down. In the USN he’d have been thrown overboard at 20+ knots, at 2 am, at least 100 miles from shore. After having a used piece of clothing shoved in his throat. I’ll leave to your imagination what piece.
Ruckus
@karen gail:
It likely happens more than one might imagine. A flight deck looks big when you are walking on it. It cannot look anything close to too big when trying to land on it. (USN vet) I have been on landing duty behind a US aircraft carrier and we had to pick a guy up after his landing attempt. It is not in any way easy to land on a moving, rather small landing area. And when I say moving it is not just side to side, it is also moving up and down. Not as much as a smaller ship, but move around it does. (I was on forward refueling on that guided missile destroyer and we refueled from the carrier we sometimes followed on plane crash duty. (The ship I was on was steam powered, the boilers were converted to burn JP5 rather than the very minimally refined sludge we burned prior to that) which meant we could refuel from an aircraft carrier. One less fuel that the navy had to use, and carry also more power per gallon.
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
It’s NOT. Being on the front page is not leading. It is often about being an asshole and/or doing something completely stupid, or being so fucking dumb that it’s a wonder you manage to breathe. Or how unlucky you are.
News is about really good stuff or really bad stuff happening. shitforbrains (and his cohorts) are in concept #2. It’s not news if it’s normal day to day stuff. Of course shitforbrains and his cohorts are always in the middle of concept #2. It’s all they know.
kindness
For Hegseth to be pictured saying no to drugs is quite paradoxical. I can’t shake the notion that Secretary Kegstand has a prescription of roofies laying around somewhere.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: In one of his Harry Maxim novels, Gavin Lyall has former soldier turned civil servant talking about a former naval aviator and he says, “If he is crazy enough to try to land a plane on a ship, he is crazy enough to be an admiral.” Note: Lyall was ex-RAF, so he probably had Opinions about both the army and navy.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
To be honest I thought that it might keep me out of Vietnam to join the navy, that and I am a citizen so protecting our concept of government is part of the deal in my mind.
I got sent to the Atlantic side of the country, so in the end I got to see a lot of the world and the danger level was smaller than say a buddy of mine who did a judicial joining of the USMC. He thought it might get him out of a possible situation that never came to fruition and it put him in Vietnam during the middle of the fun. He was standing in Vietnam shortly after landing with some others and the sergeant asked if anyone could type. He raised his hand and became a company clerk for the duration of his tour. Sometimes if you play your cards reasonably you can get a reasonable hand.
Now about that landing on a carrier. I wanted at one point in time to be a navy pilot and thought landing on a carrier would be “cool.” Reality is often a wake up call of epic proportions. The ship I ended up on, a guided missile destroyer did three, six month long fun times cruises in the Atlantic, so I missed the fun of Vietnam, but did get to be on plane landing guard duty on occasion, in case someone ended up not on deck but taking a nice salt water bath. The success there wasn’t the fun that it sounds like but we did get to give a ride to someone that ended up where he wasn’t supposed to land. Good times.
Speaking of good times, I have an obnoxious upstairs neighbor who is the most pompous, arrogant ass I’ve ever met who seems to be, imagine that, not having a good day. His wife is somewhat disabled, not terribly but somewhat and of course he could not let her out do him at anything so he’s now using a walker and is still a pompous arrogant asshole. I put this here because he is either coming or going and as normal is pissed at his rather nice wife for no reason whatsoever. Some humans really do test the ability of others to not beat them about the head and shoulders with heavy objects. But then it really wouldn’t be worth the effort because I believe his learned/learning curve would be difficult to see with a 1000x microscope. And a search protocol requiring a 6 year collage degree.
Kayla Rudbek
@Booger: maybe that’s why the term makes my skin crawl! As a Cold War military brat, it was generally “the troops” or soldiers/sailors/Marines/airmen.
Kayla Rudbek
@TONYG: Hegseth only focuses on Mars/Ares and pays no attention to Minerva/Pallas Athena
Kayla Rudbek
@Omnes Omnibus: yeah, as in all Navy people are at least slightly nuts (as you must be to venture out on the sea in small vessels for long periods of time)? Marines of course are definitely nuts, because “in the Army, Navy and Air Force, you have all sorts of ways to sneak up on people and kill them, but there is no good way to sneak up on a beach.”