Eric Beversluis
7K posts
@ehb2013ehb
PhD ethics & social philosophy, doctoral-level economist. Now writing mysteries that explore moral dilemmas.
🚨 🇺🇸 Breaking: An hour after announcing his resignation, the US Army Chief of Staff says: "A madman will lead the great US military to ruin."
BREAKING: War Secretary Pete Hegseth is removing two additional Army generals tonight: Gen. David Hodne, head of Army Transformation and Training Command, and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., chief of the Army chaplain corps, The Washington Post reports
JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next. Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades. George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks. The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order. No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide. A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute. The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no. The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
WATCH: The White House took down this video, but we still have it. Trump: We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We're fighting wars. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.
The Democratic shutdown?! Dude, you have the the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats are without power. You just turned down a bill passed unanimously in the Senate to pay American workers. Blame yourself!
The Senate must reconvene Immediately A staggering 260,000 DHS employees and their families have gone without pay for more than a month This is not a time for any Senate recess—let alone an unusually long one Nor was it a good time to recess a month ago—at the beginning of the DHS shutdown—when the Senate recessed for ten days, ignoring my stern warnings about the dire consequences that decision would produce As it turns out, I was right; what I warned would happen has happened To double down on the same mistake now—and recess for not just for one week but for two—would be unforgivable Bad things happen when we make bad decisions And bad decisions are far more likely to occur when scheduling decisions are prompted more by a desire to let senators leave Washington—whether for international travel or just to go home—than to achieve favorable policy outcomes
