We knew this was coming, but it’s still a slap in the face coming from a boozer with no qualifications for the position except for slavish loyalty to the Cheeto.
I hope Captain Kelly gets a fair hearing on his appeal, but I assume he won’t as it’ll be strictly internal to the DOD.
Deferment Orangbán rides again. Trump really found a gem in this one. Hegseth is a prime example of everyone in this administration…poster children for how far you can go by just kissing someone’s ass.
Trump’s new mantra: “And when you’re American, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the oil field.”
One of the best essays I read on this likened the whole cast of characters at the press conference discussing the invasion of VZ as the stock cast of a 1980’s movie about high school fuckups. You have for example Kegsbreath, the jock who has no idea how dumb he actually is; Stephen Miller, the “quiet one” who seems like he’d prefer to be home pulling the legs off bugs; Marco Rubio, the geeky one who has fallen in with the wrong crowd and tries to act as tough as he wishes he was; and Trump the gang leader who is bigger than everyone else simply because he was held back so many times that he’s actually in his mid-twenties.
On the other hand, Trump is often under-estimated. The American Prospect today asks the rhetorical question, “what if they manage to pull this off?”
Neither I nor The American Prospect are rooting for Trump, but considering the weak and misguided responses of many in the West (I’m looking at you, Starmer) and the political theater of Maduro in a nasty prison awaiting his show trial, you never know for sure.
If you somehow didn’t believe the U.S. was an oligarchy, try this on for size: Trump didn’t notify Congress or brief them on his impending operation in Venezuela, but he did brief oil company executives.
Wow, really? Do you have a source that can be used later, if the need arises?
Article 92 of the UCMJ establishes a duty to disobey illegal orders, even without Senators stating such a patently obvious requirement of all members of the military.
Under the current administration’s MO, SecWar might simply change military law and strike the “disobey” part despite such an action normally needing legislated by Congress.
Easy peasy. Stop licking your boss’s boots and get busy, Sneaky Pete. If you can dream it, you can do it!
I think it’s now bleeding obvious that no significant number of military personnel have or will disobey illegal orders.
There’s always been a tension in the military about this. On the one hand yes you can’t do unconstintutional things, but you can’t have every private / grunt deciding what orders are legal. That has to be done further up the chain of command. And since Trump dismissed the top generals who might have stood up to him at the very beginning, I was never holding my breath that the ones remaining would suddenly stand up to someone to whom they owed a considerable promotion.
It came from the Cheeto’s own mouth. This article has an embedded video with him saying it.
Service members are most definitely expected to know and follow IHL. They are briefed thoroughly by military lawyers and/or their chain of command prior to deployments and sometimes even during as well, IME.
There are defenses if someone disobeys an order that turns out to be lawful. And typically, senior noncommissioned officers, who will be quite familiar with battlefield legalities by that point, are the ones to challenge orders from the officers in charge. It is extremely rare for lower ranking service members to need to verify and question legality.
2020202020202020
Just a couple of months ago I played “What new horror awaits us” every morning. Now I’m playing it every hour.
Epstein Situation Distraction Level 1000.
I console myself with the fact that everything Trump touches fails. As there are no adults in his second administration this will be an exercise in a child running the world.
If there was ever a red flag that America needs to reform its educational system, MAGA punctuates it perfectly. Of course, MAGA is also the poster child for involuntary sterilization as well…
I’m waiting for China to move on Taiwan. Trump opened the flood gates with this nonsense in Venezuela and it would be naive to think that other countries will not follow his example.
This is boiler plate transactional narcissism.
Surely this will involve a legal response form Kelly, as telling people in the US military they have duty to the constitution that overrides all else is hardly seditious. Palpatine may not care, but he has sworn an oath himself to protect the constitution.
Surely Kelly has the right, as does any US citizen under the 1st amendment to criticise any aspect of his government, I guess we will find out if that right still holds.
I’m sure Kelly will have legal recourse via the courts. He has stated that he intends to do whatever it takes to reverse this nonsense.
He’ll undoubtedly lose the administrative appeal at the DOD because the cards are stacked against him there, and then he sues in federal court. I’ll look forward to the trial in federal court where he will most likely win.
This whole thing will increase his visibility with the general public just in time for the 2028 election cycle. The MAGAt faithful would never vote for him due to the (D) after his name, but this guy has flown combat missions off aircraft carriers and has commanded space shuttle missions, and that’ll be a huge contrast with what we have now.
For once, the Orange moron may just be correct about something. And it’s a FAFO to boot.
Such a funny old world.
The biggest surprise for me in that list is “The stock market will rise”. Despite all of the chaos Trump has caused over the last year, the market is at record highs, and the DOW is about to break 50,000 for the first time. The market was up significantly yesterday, the first trading day after Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, and is up again today.
This mystifies me. It looks like much of the rise is driven by AI, which has been hyped all year, but AI companies are just part of the DOW. I’m beginning to wonder if the market is totally immune to Trump’s machinations.
