You can see which way the political weathervane is blowing. Donald Trump is going to have to do some kind of damage control, preferably sooner rather than later. A recent Daily Mail/JL Partners survey showed a whopping 63% of those polled believe the Secretary of Defense (or War, take your pick) want the man gone. Public sentiment is against Pete Hegseth. And I remind you of Abraham Lincoln’s words, “Public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail. Against it, nothing can succeed.” Does Trump get how bad things are?
While 26 percent say he should keep his job and another 20 percent were unsure, when the uncertainty option was taken away from the 1,013 voters polled, a whopping 63 percent wanted Hegseth ousted.
The poll conducted December 3-5 – after revelations of the second strike circulated and criticism ensued – still indicates support for the Trump administration actions against Venezuela.
Nearly half of respondents say they support anti-narcoterrorism operations, while 30 percent say they are against the strikes.
The Trump administration justifies all actions against narcoterrorism in the Caribbean and Atlantic thus far and asserts they have not violated any laws of armed conflict.
But bipartisan voices in Congress and legal experts warn that the second strike constitutes a war crime because it targeted hors de combat individuals – or attacks against those out of action due to injury.
And we’re not at war, a condition where homicide is justifiable. Unjustified homicide is murder, plain and simple. Hegseth murdered people when he ordered a second strike (and he’s comically trying to spin it as self defense when these two people were overboard and hanging onto debris in the ocean, with their only unlikely alternative being to swim to Jamaica.) Hegseth could have chosen to be humane if he had fished them out of the water, and he might have even have gotten some good intelligence from them.
Or, he might have found out that the ship was carrying no cargo at all. Perhaps Hegseth even anticipated such a testimony and so wanted to eliminate the possibility for same.
We can only speculate in situations where Hegseth is going to kill all the principals involved, in the “fog of war” or no. It would truly be illuminating if some of these people could be allowed to speak for themselves. But then that would defeat the very purpose of these rituals, which is political theater. But at what cost? Not just to the human beings killed and their families, but to the image of our nation. This is who we are in the world right now? Is it who we want to be?
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