My, my, my. Petey Boy isn’t doing so well these days. He’s under some serious pressure from the Senate, and his failures are being thrown in his face, with everyone hammering him for real answers, not his usual off-the-cuff nonsense. We’ve figured out that he says things as a way to deflect from giving an actual answer. Apologies for the delay on this one. With gratitude for Raw Story:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was accused of “gross negligence” Tuesday by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), as three more Americans were killed in battle last weekend. Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, charged that Hegseth failed to fully warn President Donald Trump that the Strait of Hormuz would close — and that Americans are now paying for it with their lives. The confrontation came at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Trump’s supplemental funding request, which includes roughly $10 billion for farmers hit by the war-driven collapse in global fuel and fertilizer supplies.
Uh oh. The more we learn about this supplemental funding request, the worse it looks. The money for the farmers is a good thing. The money for something else is not. Hegseth has to answer for why the Defense Department needs a substantial amount of more money. But there’s more to this than that. There is substantially more to this. Hegseth “needs” more money for the war that we’re losing. He needs to turn around the tide of bad luck. The question is if they give him the extra money, will he be able to turn around the war with Iran that we are losing so painfully it’s embarrassing to say?
Reed noted that the Pentagon had spent years planning for a potential military campaign against Iran — and that any such plan would have assumed the strait could be closed. “Were you unaware of that?” Reed asked. Hegseth did not dispute it. “Of course, the Strait of Hormuz was front and center in every single aspect of that,” Hegseth replied before defecting by attacking the Biden administration. “We had U.S. boats that surrendered to Iranian ships under the Biden administration,” the defense secretary argued. “Listen, we’re talking about the war you started,” Reed said, cutting him off.
Thank you, Senator Reed! Lay it right out there! Hegseth tried the Trump dance around an issue he didn’t want to discuss, and the Senator yanked him right back onto the subject. It’s not working, Petey Boy. He is in deep waters, hanging on to a piece of wood and hoping the predators of the sea don’t notice him. Senator Reed is circling in. We *are* talking about the forever war. Hegseth doesn’t want to admit he made a mistake. How could they not have thought about the Strait? A child could do better by just looking at a map. They didn’t think about it, just like there was probably no plan put together for the attack.
“Not a situation in which oil was flowing freely,” Senator Reed continued. “There was no conflict. We weren’t losing personnel as a result of Iranian actions. So, your fallback to the Biden administration is just a very, very obvious excuse for what I think is probably — as you described so often — gross negligence.” “You did not fully inform the president that you would be in a situation where the Strait of Hormuz could be effectively closed, oil prices could surge, and effectively, the Iranians could maintain their ability to strike back as they are right now. They just killed some of our servicemen last weekend.” Hegseth tried to recover from the senator’s criticism by heaping praise on Trump.
“All the more reason why President Trump deserves the kind of praise he should get for undertaking this effort,” Hegseth said, “having the courage to ensure that crazy Islamists can’t have a nuclear weapon…” “Excuse me,” Reed replied. “He should be praised for starting a war without authority, creating a situation in which the world economy is suffering tremendously. We have to have extra money for our farmers, and we have no outcome — at least no realistic outcome — in sight yet.”
WHAM. Gotcha! He just laid the hammer down on Hegseth. I wonder what the aftermath of this will be. It will certainly be a learning experience if the information ever gets out to us. Finally, someone was able to “nail” Hegseth to the wall about this stupid, ridiculous, money-sucking, unplanned war. It’s one thing to go after Iran for a very specific purpose. But blowing things up is not the war. It’s just wasting expensive munitions. Desert Storm, if you were around that far back, was exactly what was needed. Go in, do the thing, get out. It was *fast*. This is going to go into the history books as Trump’s and Hegseth’s Forever War.
See you soon!
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