A "Red Dawn" Sort of Gen-Xer

3 Cheers Given Then Taken, Journalism, Arts, &tc.

Dear Friends,

Welcome to The Quarter Inch, a midweek roundup on current events and sundries. Let’s get right to it.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with a number of other generals. Lots of people are howling that this is some kind of unprecedented thing. It isn’t. Presidents fire generals very often. Others hysterically worry that this signals some kind of fascist impulse, like Trump installing “yes men” in the military for nefarious purposes. But Rich Lowry really likes this move, and so do I. I have said for years and years that if I were President for a day I would fire the entire general officer corps. Why? Because as anyone who has read Anton Myrer’s Once An Eagle knows, it tends to be filled with Courtney Massengales—or if not quite that bad (he’s one of the worst villains I’ve ever encountered in literature), at least completely institutionalized, politically correct bureaucrats who likely advanced for all the wrong reasons. If I were Secretary Hegseth, I would scour the records for all the full-bird colonels who were passed over for promotion and find the Sam Damons. Warriors. That seems to be Hegseth’s ethos: total commitment to meritocracy and lethality, which is what a military is for. Three cheers.

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This week the United States of America teamed up with Russia, North Korea, and Belarus in the United Nations to vote against a resolution blaming Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. I am a “Red Dawn” sort of Gen-Xer, and I’m not quite sure what to do now that my country is openly siding with Russians against the “Wolverines.” We used to stick up for people resisting tyranny and fighting for their freedom. What a disgrace. I’ll take back those three cheers.

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Journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are publishing a new book entitled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice To Run Again. Alex Thompson was one of the very few journalists during the campaign to publicly (and courageously) notice that Joe Biden was obviously declining, so he has some credibility. Jake Tapper? Give me a break.

The spectacle of “news journalists” who were oblivious to something everyone with eyes and ears could see and hear for the last four years (of course, they weren’t oblivious; they were complicit) trying to sell us a book on how the bastards managed to hide the truth from them (and us) is hilarious. And a pathetic and sad commentary on the state of journalism in America. I hope the publisher paid a huge advance and they sell a whopping dozen copies.

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Speaking of journalism, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos posted this note today:

This is not going over well in left wing “Resistance” land, nor, I imagine, in the newsroom of the Washington Post. I welcome the turn away from Lefty progressivism; let the New York Times monopolize that market. I am also cautiously heartened that Bezos thinks individual liberty and free markets are moral issues. Obviously there needs to be some defining, but this is very much a step in the right direction toward a free and virtuous society.