In the craft of propaganda, one of the slyest techniques is euphemism — soft words for hammer blows.
“Enhanced interrogation” for torture.
“Downsized” for vaporized careers.
“Alternative facts” for one who lies with each breath.
Out in the Caribbean among the shards of an outboard-motor craft, make that several, we have “collateral damage” — another word for people we killed.
Oh, and don’t forget the newest addition to the public lexicon: “double tap” – Mafia-speak for returning to finish the hit.
How about “fog of war”? That’s our leaders’ license to kill just about anyone, apparently.
And when did we declare war? And if so, why? And who are “we” in this scenario?
“We” is not me or you. Or Congress. Or the courts.
“We” is a comfy little cabal, safe in its situation room. Calling the shots: a sleep-deprived leader living his “might is right” fantasies and a secretary of defense who is operating way above his pay grade.
The latter is Pete Hegseth. Until the indefensible choice of him to lead America’s military, he was a propagandist by trade on “Fox and Friends.”
Notwithstanding a stint in the National Guard, sadly we now see in Hegseth a man not even possessing beginner’s pool qualifications to lead the world’s largest fighting force.
Having been air-dropped into the deep end, he is so over his head he can be identified only by his golden Speedos.
The first indicator of the need for a Mickey Mouse flotation device for the man was his reckless group-chat on Discord sharing advance operational details of a military strike on Yemen. Participants: Cabinet officials, the vice president, Hegseth’s wife, his brother, his attorney and — oopsie-daisy! — a magazine editor.
No biggie, shrug the same people who said Hillary Clinton should be in shackles.
In advance of an inspector general’s report on the Discord debacle, Hegseth pronounced, “Total exoneration” — for efficiency’s sake, words clearly programmed into every White House keyboard from this administration’s infancy.
The inspector general did not share Hegseth’s “no-a culpa.”
The report found the group chat on a non-secure medium had “created a risk of operational security” that endangered troops.
Fast-forward to now, and several members of Congress want hearings into Hegseth’s role in a potential war crime on the high seas.
First problem: We aren’t at war.
Problem second: Most of the outrage appears focused on the second of the two “taps.”
The crime is the first tap, and its name is murder.
Even if it’s true that Hegseth, as he claims, knows who was on the boats in question and what they were transporting, it remains human slaughter on bare pretense. And “bare” clearly overstates the Pentagon’s case.
The latest revelation is that the crew obliterated in the “double tap” was not headed to the United States but to Suriname. (Google that and explain to us the imminent threat.)
No, the crime is not the second half of this horror, the destruction of a single boat. It’s the pretextual murder of up to 80 people in places where we have no business playing war games with live ammo.
That’s all one can say about what appears to be a build-up to military action against Venezuela. To convince us all of this is justified, we are to believe without a shred of evidence that whomever the U.S. kills on the open seas is a “narcoterrorist.”
Conservative icon George Will calls it a “war crime without a war.”
After The Washington Post laid out exactly what the White House at first tried to explain away the two-strike kill shot, Republican Sen. Rand Paul said this:
“Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this, and it did not happen. It was ‘fake news’” (another favored phrase clearly programmed into White House keyboards.)
After the administration acknowledged that the Post’s story was largely correct, while attempting to insulate Poor Pete from responsibility, Paul said one could only deduce that either Hegseth was lying about his role or “is incompetent and didn’t know it had happened.”
That’s too many choices.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
