Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt
Pete Hegseth is an unfit disgrace who lacks every quality of integrity, decency and wisdom a man whose work involves sending others to die should possess.
He is callous, cruel, arrogant, selfish, extreme, and very stupid.
He is a broken boy in a costume, a misfit among men, whose performative behavior and extremist religious beliefs melded to a first-rate talent for sycophancy and utter faithlessness towards the US Constitution. It makes the demented Fox News hack a case study for the dangers of Little Eichmanns with power.
The man who calls himself “Secretary of War” is a real-life Douglas Niedermeyer from “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”
The truth is that what they say is indeed stranger than fiction.
The United States is losing the war in Iran.
It is not succeeding.
The Iranian regime is not crumbling.
Donald Trump hesitated in January when the regime was wobbling. He got the “yips.”
The war at hand has no known objectives beyond the unachievable and moronic blusterings of Trump’s gang of constitutional miscreants and corrupt extremists, who contradict each others’ lies with more lies, more nonsense and more propaganda.
The propaganda is Stalinesque.
The media coverage on Fox News, OANN, CBS, Newsmax and across the right-wing sewer is a moral disaster. Pure filth. All lies.
There are so many lies that it is hard to know where to stop and linger, where to reflect a bit about the words falling on us from the people betraying the United States of America, like Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump.
Let’s talk about values.
Let’s talk about the law.
Let’s talk about judgement.
Here is Pete Hegseth announcing the sinking of an Iranian frigate as a “quiet death:”
Here is Donald Trump joking that the military had “more fun” sinking an Iranian ship, which was unarmed and returning to port from a naval parade at the invitation of the Indian government:
Pete Hegseth claims a title for himself that has been conjured by a man who has no power to change the law by whim, or grant titles that don’t exist.
There is no “Secretary of War,” just a degenerate poseur who is consumed by the idea of violence as a virtue for the sake of violence itself to show that we are strong, and they are weak.
He is the instrument of Stephen Miller’s hatreds.
Do you remember what Terry Moran said, resulting in his firing from ABC News
Do you remember what Matthew Dowd was fired for at MSNBC? He said this about Charlie Kirk:
He was constantly pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to: Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. … You can’t say these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.
Here is the creed of Stephen Miller in a CNN interview:
Those are the words of a true Nazi, a pure fascist.
They are un-American.
They are devoid of our values. They dishonor generations of American soldiers, sailors, seaman and marines who have what Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion” to the Republic.
The Republic is a singular achievement in the annals of human history, but it is under siege from a virus that starts in the human heart, where malice and a fetish for death arises. There seems to be a great joy for killing inside of Pete Hegseth.
He likes the power.
Remember the dead Americans, as Pete Hegseth made clear that they were all part of a media plot to make his master Trump look bad?
Trump, of course, can look no worse. He is deranged and incompetent in a combination that is known but to few in the annals of history. Filled with malice, surrounded by sycophants and corruption, he is a true American Nero, and he has lit the world on fire.
Twenty nations are now under the gun.
Trump promised peace, and delivered war.
The periscope camera aboard the unnamed US submarine that became the first US submarine to sink a ship since June of 1945 caught what happened when the Mark 48 (MK48) torpedo slammed into the hull of the unarmed frigate, killing at least 87 people, stranding 32 at sea 32, with 61 more unaccounted for.
No quarter was given.
No surrender demanded.
The ship was sunk 2,500 miles from Iranian shores, and it was unarmed.
Why didn’t the US submarine surface from behind and demand surrender?
Wouldn’t it have been better to capture the Iranian vessel and show the world happy Iranian sailors being treated well? Fed well? Clothed well?
Wouldn’t that have been powerful?
What if those Iranian sailors asked for political asylum? Wouldn’t that be bad for the mullahs?
Pete Hegseth wanted death, and he killed to get what he wished for.
War is terrible, and the life and death orders from a secretary of defense should have purpose.
Killing for sport is an evil, and Pete Hegseth is yet another sinister angel of death let loose by MAGA fascists at the edge of an abyss.
What comes next is not an abstract question.
It is an urgent one.
A necessary one.
What is happening must be opposed.
It is a catastrophe unfolding in real-time.
The American ship of state is helmed by fools. It is cheered by sycophants who share a love of taking that unites their greed with Trump’s malice and disregard to create a cancer on liberty, and a federal government that is officious, out of control, immoral dishonest and utterly reprehensible.
Markwayne Mullin’s confirmation hearings must be a forum about the turning of industrial warehouses into concentration camps.
It is an unconstitutional obscenity.
This is an age of obscenity, and it must be stomped out.
We the people are sovereign.
I read somewhere that:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Sinking the Iranian ship was un-American.
It reflects very badly on the United States.
It was an appalling decision.
It deserves deep scrutiny.
There is no part of Trump’s deadly folly that has been thought through.
None.
Zero.
The world is on fire, and criminals amongst us are attempting to rule over us all, and trifle with our liberty, safety and our children’s freedom.
Do not tread on us.
This indecency must be opposed.
It is unconscionable.
How do you spell immoral?
P-E-T-E-H-E-G-S-E-T-H
Steve Schmidt
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
