To the editor:

Pete Hegseth, like so many of Trump’s nominees for top government posts, was and is wholly unqualified for the job for which he’s been entrusted. The red flags, sent up by his own mother and chronicled by his immature displays of public drunkenness, weren’t enough to sway Republicans from keeping Pete from becoming a cabinet member as the Secretary of Defense. After all, whatever Donald wanted, Donald got, and the hearings were nothing but a rubber stamp to approve the President’s Fox News Network cavalcade of incompetent clowns. Oh, the Republican Senators acted as if they had some reservations during the appointment process, but their subjugation to the President’s will was in the bag. (How bad did Matt Gaetz have to be not to get Pam Bondi’s Attorney General post?)

Now the impulsive Pete Hegseth has gone and done it. Secretary of defense was not a cool enough name for his job. He wanted something a little more in line with his woman-hating, DEI-hating, and defense-hating martial tendencies. He wanted something to be as cool as he pictures himself to be. In swooped the President, who stayed awake long enough on Sept. 5 to sign the Executive Order to give the Department of Defense a secondary name of Department of War. Cool. That’s a title Pete can really embrace.

This cool new name gave Pete the impetus to start blowing up suspected drug-carrying boats off the coast of Venezuela. Now it appears that impetuous Pete has gone a bridge too far. When a pair of suspected drug dealers had the audacity to survive Pete’s lethal strike, he’s reportedly deemed it necessary to kill the…are they civilians or POW’s?

It doesn’t matter what they were. If they were civilians, Pete’s order would be murder. If they were POW’s in Pete’s war, it’s a war crime. Either way, Pete should start preparing himself for…of course, a Presidential pardon. In the aftermath of an anticipated pardon, at least the President won’t be able to say that he doesn’t even know him.

Keith R. Klawitter

Morgan