Voenix Rising

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Bourbon-brined, grievance-gargling, pomade-plastered Pentagon pick-me prick Pete Hegseth is destroying our fucking military.

He’s ripping experienced leadership out by the roots, draining lifetimes of military knowledge through the floorboards, poisoning promotions and turning what was once the world’s most formidable fighting force into a loyalty-soaked revenge arcade for political sycophants.

Every one of us is less safe, less secure, more exposed and more vulnerable because this spectacularly unqualified little fuckwit has been allowed to take a blowtorch to the load-bearing beams while everybody who could stop him stands around admiring the fucking sparks.

This should be the biggest scandal on the news, but Hegseth is running feral while the obese, orange, ossifying, orthopedically elevated octogenarian obscenity of a so-called Commander-in-Chief, a sagging sack of appetites and adipose with the moral architecture of a tapeworm and the cognitive sparkle of a concussed turnip, wanders off to fondle ballrooms, granite walkways, helipads and whatever other architectural dick-extension flutters through his marble-addled frontal lobe while American service members fight and die in his endless, illegal, unconstitutional war with Iran.

All of that contempt, neglect and appetite for more is sitting there in plain sight on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which limped into port in Thailand this week looking like a hundred-thousand-ton fucking ghost.

And it made me sick to my stomach.

For weeks we’ve heard about exhausted sailors and Marines, mental-health crises, terrified families telling anyone who’d listen their loved ones were breaking, only to have Hegseth basically accuse those families of lying.

Donald Trump, the five-time draft-dodging military dilettante whose closest relationship to sacrifice is insulting the people who make it, heard the Lincoln had endured the longest consecutive stretch at sea without a real port call for a modern carrier and said it was “not nearly long enough.”

Bitch, you take a golf cart to the buffet line.

And this wasn’t the ordinary oxidation and wear of some garden-variety deployment. Iran hammered the Navy’s main logistics hub in Bahrain at the beginning of Trump’s war, stretching supply lines thousands of miles and helping turn the mundane maintenance, cleaning, resupply and human relief of a normal port call into another casualty of Darth Dorito’s geopolitical dick-swinging.

So the Lincoln kept going.

Month after month of strain, separation, heat and seawater until she finally came in looking like something had been taken out of her.

I know ships rust. Saltwater is a ravenous, remorseless bastard that chews paint and punishes steel.

But Jesus Christ.

Look at her.

Battered. Depleted. Scarred. Pushed past reason and still expected to perform.

That is draft-dodging Donald Trump and day-drunk Pete Hegseth’s military in one fucking image.

I’ve always loved warships. Years ago, when Leo was little, we hit the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel coming home from the Outer Banks as enormous Navy vessels headed toward Norfolk, and I was practically bouncing in my seat grabbing my phone and checking hull numbers as they passed, collecting them in my head like baseball cards because I wanted to know every fucking one of them.

These massive gray leviathans sliding through dark water with that impossible marriage of menace and majesty, carrying sailors, history and enough American firepower to rearrange somebody’s entire coastline.

I felt like a little kid.

I was in awe.

I still am.

And that memory was still sitting there in my head when I saw the Lincoln come into Thailand, weather-whipped, corrosion-streaked and almost spectral, her crew saying they wanted home, American power looking wounded while the soft-handed assholes responsible congratulated themselves on toughness.

And inside all that battered steel were thousands of sailors and Marines who looked like somebody had been strip-mining them too.

Because Trump and Hegseth are depredators, rapacious consumers who use, push, bleed, hollow out and keep demanding more from anything unfortunate enough to fall within their reach until the shine is gone, the marrow is sucked dry and somebody else is left carrying the damage.

They mistake resilience for permission, endurance for an invitation and sacrifice for an endlessly renewable resource they’re entitled to keep fucking consuming.

Sailors. Marines. Soldiers. Airmen. Stretched thin, ground down, overruled and treated like human inventory with no expiration date by political leaders who think patriotism means swallowing whatever punishment gets shoveled down from above, snapping a salute and waiting politely for another scoop.

And the bastard holding the shovel has been waiting years for his turn.

Hegseth came into this job hauling a fetid duffel bag stuffed with old resentments, bruised ego, perceived betrayals and unprocessed humiliation from an institution he spent years sneering at as weak and woke, and Trump handed this damaged little DUI hire the Pentagon and enough power to start converting private wounds into promotions, purges and national defense policy.

He isn’t reforming the military.

He’s getting even with it.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll finally walked after watching senior leadership get hacked apart, promotions pawed through and the Army’s upper command turned into some fucked-up combination of ideological casting call, personal burn book and Survivor: Pentagon, except the immunity idol is apparently blind obedience to the booze-breathed peacock upstairs.

Driscoll went to Trump to tell him how fucking bad it had gotten.

Trump, who has been considerably busier building shrines to himself and pissing his name across Washington like some incontinent pharaoh armed with a Dymo label maker, was reportedly surprised.

Of course he fucking was.

He doesn’t pay attention because he doesn’t give a shit. Are they killing the people he wants killed? Do the explosions make him look tough? Can he slap his name on a ship after scraping somebody else’s off first?

That’s about the outer limit of this lacquered little Caesar’s geopolitical imagination.

China knew. Russia knew. Iran knew. Every foreign intelligence service with electricity and two functioning eyeballs knew America was bleeding senior military experience while Donald Trump played Louis XIV of Palm Beach and his gin-drenched GI Joe took a Sawzall to the Army.

Hegseth inherited ten active-duty four-star Army generals.

He’s down to five.

Half the constellation of stars over the Army’s senior command has blinked out while its Secretary leaves, its permanent Chief of Staff seat sits empty and the Vice Chief does double duty as drones, AI and electronic warfare rewrite combat underneath their boots.

Pete Hegseth has taken out more American generals than Iranian ones.

C.Q. Brown, only the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fired. Lisa Franchetti, first woman to lead the Navy, fired. Linda Fagan, first woman to lead an armed-service branch, fired. Randy George, Purple Heart recipient and forty-two-year Army veteran, pushed out, while Hegseth claws through the upper ranks with Leatherface-level personnel instincts and the wounded vanity of a prom king who discovered somebody else got elected class president.

And this sexist, bigoted fucknugget told us what he wanted: generals and admirals involved in “DEI woke shit” had to go.

In Hegseth’s rancid culture-war lexicon, “DEI” is a linguistic trapdoor beneath any woman or person of color these meritocracy-molesting motherfuckers would rather believe was handed a career than concede might simply be more accomplished than they are.

He’s been reaching his sticky little ideological fingers into promotion lists already vetted by people who actually know what the fuck they’re doing, and the result is a senior military landscape being bleached of women and Black officers while Kegbreath congratulates himself on restoring “merit.”

There isn’t a single active-duty female four-star general or admiral left.

And this asshole reportedly thought Driscoll wasn’t sufficiently deferential.

Deferential.

To Pete fucking Hegseth.

A smug, self-sanctifying little martinet with the magnificent certitude of a guy who read three Sun Tzu quotes under wolf photos on Instagram and has spent ever since wondering why nobody’s asked him to take Constantinople.

My dad spent fifty years at the Department of Defense designing weapons systems on an Army base here in Jersey, and some of my sweetest childhood memories are tangled up in that place. Summer was the officers’ club pool, chlorine stiffening our hair, Coppertone slick on our skin, while Dad was inside those buildings doing work Kim and I were far too little to understand.

We got one dollar to split fries from the 19th Hole, one grease-translucent paper basket, ketchup packets ripped open with wet teeth and two Malooly girls attempting bilateral potato diplomacy without plunging the family into armed conflict. Camp David had Begin, Sadat and Carter. We had one suspiciously enormous crinkle-cut and no neutral observer. Henry Kissinger could’ve shuttle-diplomacied his ass between us all afternoon and eventually told Dad, “Sir, buy another basket.”

God, I love that memory.

My dad gave that place nearly his entire working life, and I miss him every single day.

But I’m glad he didn’t have to see this shit.

I’m glad he didn’t have to see what became of his beloved Department of Defense.

There are Republicans in Congress who know exactly what this motherfucker is.

They know he’s unfit. They know he’s reckless. They know he’s hollowing out the military in real time, and they’re still standing there with their hands jammed into their pockets pretending somebody misplaced the emergency brake.

Maybe one of them will eventually locate a vertebra.

I also might wake up tomorrow a natural blonde with a metabolism from 1997 and discover somebody accidentally paid off my mortgage.

So I’m not holding my fucking breath.

When we take Congress back, this cannot end with Hegseth packing up his protein powder, pocket squares and Patton fantasies and slithering back onto cable television to explain how the woke generals betrayed him.

I want investigations.

The fishing boats. Minab. The double tap. The military lawyers. The warnings. The orders. The people who objected and the assholes who overruled them.

I want every bloody decision dragged out by the ankles, dumped onto a congressional table and dissected until we know who did what, who authorized what and whose blood is attached to which fucking signature.

I want war-crimes investigations.

I want war-crimes trials.

Period.

I do not give one solitary shit what letter is next to your name when you vote.

If you have eyes in your head and a functioning fucking pulse, you can see what Pete Hegseth is doing.

He has to go.

And getting his ass thrown out of the Pentagon does not erase what he did inside it.

He should be shackled to this record for the rest of his life, to the leaders he purged, the military he politicized, the families he dismissed and the warnings he ignored, because somebody handed a bitter, damaged, catastrophically unqualified cable-news cosplay commando the most formidable fighting force humanity has ever assembled, and he used it as a chew toy for his ego, a scratching post for his resentments and a fucking sledgehammer for his revenge.

Pete Hegseth wanted to remake the American military in his own image.

Look at the Lincoln.

Look at the Army.

He fucking did.

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