Hello, and welcome to TGIF. I’m Will Rahn, filling in for Nellie Bowles, who’s in Saudi Arabia headlining the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Go get ’em, Nel! Thankfully, the dazzling Suzy Weiss and Sean Fischer are still stateside. Now let’s get to it.
→ Secretary of Bore: Pete Hegseth, our well-coiffed defense secretary, ordered some 800 top military officers to Quantico, Virginia, this week to browbeat them about how the Pentagon had become “the woke department.” But not anymore, not on his watch, not with this former Fox News morning host in town.
It was pure theater, right up to the giant American flag behind Hegseth. That’s an obvious nod to Patton, the great 1970 movie about the only American general the Nazis truly feared. The movie begins with George Patton’s famous speech to the Third Army, a rousing call to arms in which he reminded them that every soldier had a magnificent duty to defeat the Third Reich, that “every single man in this army plays a vital role” regardless of whether they were in combat or not. Stirring stuff!
Hegseth? Well, his real audience wasn’t so much the military brass before him, but rather the president and the MAGA base. He was there to admonish the officers, not encourage them, because that’s what the White House wanted.
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