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| Pete Hegseth |
Say what? “If the words I'm speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign,” said Pete Hegseth, the egotistical and in-over-his-head Secretary of Defense, to more than 800 generals and admirals.
The words that Hegseth spoke did not sink a single heart in the room. They did rack the brains of the military brass who wondered why in the world they were in Virginia for a pep talk from a guy who reached the exalted rank of “major” in the Army National Guard.
The former Fox News host prowled the stage as it he was doing a Ted Talk. There was a giant American flag behind him, which was supposed to trigger memories of the movie, “Patton.”
Hegseth is lucky the ghost of General George Patton wasn’t in the room. Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower ordered the hard-driving Patton to apologize for slapping two soldiers during the Sicily campaign. After hearing Hegseth’s spiel, the ghost of Patton would have have been ordered to issue another apology.
Image-conscious Pete wants to recast the Department of Defense as the more aggressive-sounding the Department of War. But the Department’s website describes its mission as providing the military forces to deter war, rather than win one. That sounds more like the mission of the Peace Corps, if it still is around in TrumpLand.
Fighting the good fight… National treasure Jane Fonda has relaunched the Committee for the First Amendment to stand in defense of our Constitutional rights.
Her father, Henry Fonda, co-founded the Committee in the 1940s to counter Sen. Joe McCarthy’s House un-American Activities Committee’s hunt for communist-sympathizers in the entertainment business. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra joined the original committee.
Jane Fonda believes the forces that drove McCarthy to power have returned. “The McCarthy era ended when Americans from across the political spectrum finally came together and stood up for the principles in the Constitution against the forces of repression,” she said in a statement.
In a membership pitch letter, the 87-year-old actress noted that she has seen war, repression, protest, backlash and has been branded an enemy of the state.
“But I can tell you this: this is the most frightening moment of my life,” she wrote. “When I feel scared, I look to history. I wish there were a secret playbook with all the answers—but there never has been. The only thing that has ever worked—time and time again—is solidarity: binding together, finding bravery in numbers too big to ignore, and standing up for one another.”
The relaunched Committee is focused on the entertainment business but is well aware that the threat to freedom of expression is not exclusive to Hollywood.
Its more than 550 members include Michael Keaton, Abigail Disney, Nathan Lane, Cynthia Nixon, Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman, Sean Penn, Spike Lee, Billie Eilish, Barbra Streisand, Ben Stiller, Tony Kushner, Anjelica Huston, Aaron Sorkin, Tracey Ullman, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
The Committee wants members to speak out before it’s too late.
Ignoring the obvious. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger notes that authoritarian movements thrived in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s because people hesitated to use plain language to describe the political reality.
“They worried about sounding shrill, about dividing their countries further, about inflaming passions,” he wrote on Substack. ”By the time many were ready to name fascism, the damage was done.”
The First Amendment was not written to protect only polite opinion. “It exists precisely so citizens can call out threats to liberty—whether those threats come cloaked in religious rhetoric, “patriot” branding, or populist memes,” wrote Kinzinger. “A healthy democracy needs passionate debate and sometimes harsh words. Calling something fascist when it fits is not violence; it is self-defense.”
Let’s call it as we see it.
Thank God for Rx Companies and Uncle Sam. In Gallup’s ratings of 25 business sectors, ad & PR agencies beat out only drug companies and Uncle Sam on the bottom of the list.
Ad/PR firms chalked up a 29 percent positive score, compared to 28 percent for pharmaceutical houses and 23 percent for the US government.
Topping the list: farming (60 percent), computer companies (59 percent) and restaurants (52 percent).
I wonder if an ag PR firm would score higher than a healthcare agency—or do people put a pox on all PR firms?
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Hats off to Federal Board chairman Jerome Powell for finally getting off his duff to stand up to his unhinged taunter-in-chief. A posse of central bankers from here and afar rally in support of Powell.
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