Sen. Tammy Duckworth to Pete Hegseth:
How can we ask these warriors to train and perform the absolute highest standards when you are asking us to lower the standards to make you the Secretary of Defense simply because you’re buddies with our president-elect.
Sen. Angus King’s questioning of Hegseth was also significant. Honestly, if I hear another Trump appointee evasively say (i.e., in a way devoid of any meaning whatsoever) that they “will follow the rule of law” one more goddamn time I’m gonna flip over a table. The man despises the Geneva Conventions — and, ipso facto, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Federal Criminal Statute, which also encode the laws of the Conventions — and believes that torture and slaughter are useful tools of war as long as it’s some ever-justified us who does it to some never-justified them.
No one need don rose-colored glasses when it comes to the U.S. and the Geneva Conventions to see that an ominous defining down of deviance continues.