Skirting his debacle of a war, "smug pathetic little man," warfighter fetishist and Gen.-Patton-cosplaying clown Pete Kegsbreath just gave another blustering speech before hundreds of troops In a "hyper-macho freak show" to announce he's cutting forces, starting several senseless new programs, and bravely declaring, "We are no longer the woke (or) weak department...No fatties, trannies, beardos, weirdos, wimps, radicals. Just warriors." Appalled consensus on the yahoo "turning the military into a frat house": "What a dick."

Perhaps due to his low-rent credentials as a weekend TV host at Fox - and a history of drunkenness, adultery, sexual assault and on-the-job incompetence so sordid he needed JD's tie-breaking vote to get his job - Hegseth has built a sloppy, fragile "Department of Defensiveness" focused on shaping a narrative and persona to his liking - one based on paranoia, distrust, dysfunction, lies and frequent purges of those deemed disloyal. From his make-up studio to his press strictures to his blunders - Signalgate, the war, its first day's war crimes - Pete's spent an inordinate amount of time covering his ass and overcompensating for his failures. "He's just a true believer in way over his head, the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect,” said one DOD employee. “Generally, we consider him a joke, a deeply unqualified clown.”

Still, with men reportedly fleeing MAGA, their need to "pump up that masculine animus" is well-served by Pete's juvenile, chest-pounding, lethality-obsessed focus on testosterone in the name of a "High-T Department of War" that has "nothing to do with science and everything to do with regressive ideas of what masculinity is." The same idiocy fuels all the culture war malevolence: Banning books, gutting DEI initiatives - "Diversity is not our strength" - blocking promotions for women and Blacks, a "no more dudes and dresses" transphobia, and ending tenure for civilian professors at military academies 'cause who needs to protect independent thinkers, scholars, leaders, experts from "the tyranny of a government that actively hates its critics," the "mindset of someone who has learned nothing (from) American military failures."

And so to another cringey, Strangelovian "State of the Force Address," which was not a thing until a TV bobblehead took over the military and turned it into bumbling amateur-hour theater. Last year, he summoned nearly 800 generals, admirals, advisors from around the world, all smarter and higher-ranking than him, to rant about beards and "fat troops," tell them they "kill people and break things for a living," and prattle about a 10% cut in their numbers by "removing redundant force structure to optimize and streamline leadership." When he paused for applause, there was only deep silence. Maybe because a Joint Chiefs chairman, two service chiefs, two intelligence directors, several generals and the better part of the Army’s senior leadership "were told to run faster by a weekend television host."

On Wednesday, he gathered about 600 officers and enlisted members, again at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, for another speech. In the weeks leading up to his latest dash of show business, The Wall Street Journal reported, he emailed commanders asking them to nominate troops to attend. They had to "fit certain physical standards," he wrote, to have the proper height/weight ratio, with "impeccable grooming: "I want central casting." If they were hot enough, he added, as a bonus some would have "the opportunity" to join him in a hot and sweaty dawn work-out at the Pentagon. Totally normal! And luckily, a camera crew was there to follow them on a chanting, banner-bearing run through D.C. To make them look even cooler, he gave them all t-shirts that read, "This Is War." Or at least off-off Broadway.

Later, before a giant American flag, he dropped the hammer in a campy speech many compared to SNL's Colin Jost doing Pete Hegseth, or Tom Cruise's braying misogynist in Magnolia, or George C. Scott's Gen. Patton "minus the inspiration." Under his "less generals, more GIs" mandate - though it's "fewer" not less - he said he was doubling the previous cut of 10% of high-ranking personnel to 20% with, wrote Tom Wellborn, "the confidence of a man who has looked at the most powerful armed force in the world and concluded its central weakness was the number of people in it who outrank a major," what he was. Months into a disastrous war, "That is the force Pete Hegseth has built by subtraction. What it has lost is (what) a general is for, which is to be the person in the room who says no, and (he) has made sure, one firing at a time, there is nobody left in the room to say it."

"The media calls that a purge," blustered Hegseth, evidently expecting criticism. "I call it accountability. As usual, what the media levels as an accusation, I wear as an accomplishment.” He haughtily went on to “lay it out simply for the anti-American losers in our media...We are no longer the woke department, or the weak department. Simple translation? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors." On coverage of the war and eight attempted suicides on the USS Lincoln, he slammed “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, false claims of low troop morale or flat-out propaganda as if it’s written by our adversaries.” "The information space is a battle space," he said. "The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in." Smirking, he added,."With testosterone testing on top." Jesus, dude.

He also announced several new programs with fancy warlike names like Fortress America and Autonomous War Command or AutoWarCom, a "four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic........

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