Showing posts with label Hegseth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hegseth. Show all posts

June 26, 2025

The mad scramble to gaslight us about what we saw with our own eyes after the Iran bombing. By Hal M. Brown Who you gonna believe, us truthsayers or the lying liars in the fake news?

 




In context below, here is the statement made by Pete Hegseth in his Pentagon press conference:

Let me read the bottom line here. President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history and it was a resounding success resulting in a cease fire agreement and the end of the 12-day war.

I have no doubt that Hegseth knows about D-Day and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but does he know what that planning for the first was called Operation Overlord and the second was called The Manhattan Project? I have my doubts.

Trump and Hegseth are desperate to brag about the success of the Iran bombing. Alas, for them, they don’t have compelling photographic evidence like those on the top of this page. All they have are a few photos like the ones below which were used to illustrate an article in The Economist which had a skeptical title:

All this leads me to ask if anyone in the room asked how they’d know if the bombing was successful. Ideally this is something the president would inquire about. Certainly a Secretary of Defense ought to have asked this.

I am sure all concerned in the effort wished that their bombs had caused the mountaintop to cave in producing a large crater. Unfortunately for them, all that it resulted in were small holes in the ground.

Still, Trump’s spin machine is spinning faster than a uranium centrifugeAs explained here, that’s damn fast and not easy to achieve:

Instead of enriching uranium, Trump’s centrifuge is spinning out wishful thinking and in one case the following outright lie.

Trump wants you to believe pieces of enriched uranium (called billets) are as big as Volkswagens, in fact hundreds of them could fit in a Volkswagen.

In fact, it is the centrifuges that would be difficult to move with short notice.

Top article and bottom article.

Hegseth, like his boss, thinks that blaming the press for instilling doubt about the success of the mission is the way to convince the public. For example this…

… and this:

Of course Hegseth is just marching like a Mini-me behind Trump who set a momumental example for bad manners at the NATO press conference where he insulted reporters directly. He even called for a CNN reporter to be fired and “thrown out like a dog.”

If, for whatever reason, the raid leads to a sustainable end to the conflict and an end to Iran’s nuclear bomb ambitions it can be touted as a successs. Hopefully this will be the final result.

However, Trump in his mania to brag about “obliterating” the deeply buried facility set himself up for what would be a humilating gotcha by Iran. If Iran did manage to remove all of their enriched uranium, I can imagine a scenario where they make a show of handing it over to third party nuclear inspectors as proof that they ended their bomb grade enrichment program. 

That would be rich….

Update: Read article.

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June 18, 2025

I was going to write about how long Push-up Pete and other members of the Trump cabal have to bother testifying before Congress and then Trump came on and launched into a rant. This was supposed to be a one topic Substack. Thanks to Trump and an unhinged weave I ended up writing about two.


We learned one thing yesterday about members of Trump’s cabal, sometimes referred to as his Cabinet. They are not all invulnerable. At least not invulnerable to allergy attacks serious enough to require hospitalization. Of course I am referring to Kristi Noem. What I didn’t know until just now is that not only does she like to visit prisons in El Salvador but she, for whatever reason, decided to visit a biohazard lab with Rand Paul and RFK Jr.. (See Newsweek article.)

Perhaps she feels she must live up to her image as being fearless. Consider this from the Newsweek article:

Bruce Levell, an ally of President Donald Trump on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday: "My dear friend @Sec_Noem, our fearless Secretary of Homeland Security, was just rushed to the hospital. My heart is with her during this challenging time, but I know her strength and determination will shine through.

All this being said, Noem is one of the members of Trump’s Cabal (aka Cabinet) who has testified before Congress.

My point is that we will know when Trump has firmed up his dictatorship 100% when he tells members of his cabal to ignore Congress when they are asked to testify.

Today I thought of writing this while watching MSNBC this morning and saw this:

He’s on as I write this:

In case you wonder why I call Hegseth “Puch-up Pete” here’s a photo:

He’s competing onscreen with Trump who is talking about the glorious giant two flagpoles -with his blah blah blag braggadocio abut how great they will be.

He’s throwing in something about the fake news and the Fed lowering rates, he’s rambling on insulting Jerome Powell, abruptly shifts to talking about the best poles in the world, blah blah. He’s distracting me with the weave. He’s now insulting Biden and everyone who pops into his mind.

Holy shit… I can’t even get through writing a Substack while MSNBC is on without being led into my own “weave” thanks to Trump and his weave. 

He even compliments the construction workers and gets them to laugh and throws in Harvey Weinstein and talks about the word erection without saying it. He calls it the e-word. I wasn’t going to use the image below. I made it yesterday to post in a comment on a RawStory article about the flags:

Shit, he’s still rambling on and trying to joke with the construction workers about what would happen if any of them are illegal immigrants. He is now touting the $5 million Trump Card which would allow foreigners to buy their way into the country.

This is pure Trump. Perhaps he was frustrated when he couldn’t unleash his vitriol in his mercifully brief parade speech.

He just blasted Biden for having no clue and the autopen and men playing in women’s sports. 

Thank you, MSNBC, for restoring my sanity as they just cut away from the rant.

Okay, I can’t resist reflecting on Trump’s bringing up the e-word. Trump is obsessed with size. He just admitted that he knows damn well what he admires about how big, tall, and upright his glorious flagpoles are going to be. 

I wonder if he knows that at 100 feet it doen’t come close to being the world’s tallest flagpole (see list). The tallest is 662 feet and is in Cario. Now, that a damn tall flagpole (watch video).

Here’s a minute long segment of his “weave” rant:

Now I can have Ann proofread this for typos and send it to you.

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June 11, 2025

Why you shouldn't count on patriotic generals to save us, in two words: Pete Hegseth. By Hal M. Brown

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By now you’ve seen Trump giving his rally style speech replete with lies and insults to red beret wearing troops at Fort Bragg yesterday. You have seen almost all of them in the background cheering. If you missed the speech you can see a clip of it here.

Pete Hegseth was also there strutting his stuff although he didn’t get the TV coverage Trump did:

As the AP article (read it here) showed, not all soldiers were as enthusiastic:

I doubt many of these soldiers read articles like “Fact-check: Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg contained lies and conspiracy theories about LA” in The Guardian after the speech.

Tom Nichol’s wrote in the Atlantic “The Silence of the Generals.” The Demoractic Underground forum has the following excerpt:

The president cares nothing for the military, for its history, or for the men and women who serve the United States. They are, like everything else around him, only raw material: They either feed his narcissism, or they are useless. Those who love him, he claims as “his” military. But those who have laid down their life for their country are, as he so repugnantly put it, just suckers and losers, anonymous saps lying under cold headstones in places such as Arlington National Cemetery that clearly make Trump uncomfortable. Today, he showed that he has no compunction about turning every American soldier into a hooting partisan.
Trump’s supporters and his party will excuse his behavior at Fort Bragg the way they always have, the same way that indulgent parents shrug helplessly at their delinquent children. But senior officers of the United States military have an obligation to speak up and be leaders. Where is the Army chief of staff, General Randy George? Will he speak truth to the commander in chief and put a stop to the assault on the integrity of his troops? Where is the commander of the airborne troops, Lieutenant General Gregory Anderson, or even Colonel Chad Mixon, the base commander?
And if these men cannot muster the courage to defend American traditions—by speaking out or even resigning—where are the other senior officers who must uphold the values that have made America’s armed forces among the most effective and politically stable militaries in the world? Where is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine? He was personally selected by Trump to be America’s most senior military officer. Will he tell the man who promoted him that what he did today was obscene?
Will any of these men say one word? Will any of them defend the Army and the other services from a would-be caudillo, a man who would probably be strutting around in a giant hat and a golden shoulder braid if he could get away with it? The top officers of the U.S. military wear eagles or stars on their shoulders that give them great privilege, as befits people who assume responsibility for the defense of the nation and the welfare of their troops. They command the power of life and death itself on the field of battle. But those ranks also carry immense responsibility. If they are truly Washington’s heirs, they should speak up—now—and stand with the first commander in chief against the rogue 47th.

Trump doesn’t care if the Fort Bragg base commander, Colonel K. Chad Mixon (see link), orders his men, or any other general above him, not to defy the Constitution and orders them not to carry out illegal orders by attacking civilians. 

All Trump would do in that case is remove them and replace them with someone eager to do his bidding.

Trump has already demonstrated that in his view he doesn’t need generals, especially those who adhere to the values of the military academies they graduate from.

Case in point, those two words in my title: Pete Hegseth. 

Hegseth himself has no use for generals with their highfalutin attitudes who, as he sees it, conflate their own combat experience to look like heroes. I expect he sees their ascension up the ranks to be the result of ass kissing and a woke military. 

In an unguarded moment talking among fierce loyalists I can see Trump saying to Hegseth “we don’t need those fucken generals.” Hegseth of course would heartedly agree.

As far as Hegseth is concerned generals who you and I would consider patriotic are a superfluous annoyance best dealt with by firing them, not by ordering a court martial and having them sent to prison at Leavenworth. 

Why does he need generals when he has Commander in Chief Trump to tell him what he wants the armed forces to do? He’s number two and when his number one says jump he will say “how high?” Trump will ask “how high can you jump?” From what we’ve seen of Hegseth, I think he’d want to curry favor with Trump by telling him just how high his great military is capable of jumping.

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