Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth continue to violate the Constitution now using religion to justify the illegal war in Iran

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28 Democrats just demanded an investigation into Pete Hegseth (Whiskey Pete) after hundreds of troops reported commanders pushing end-times Christian fascism as justification for the Iran war.
Reps. Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, and Chrissy Houlahan led the charge, requesting DoD Inspector General Platte B. Moring III investigate reports of commanders "invoking religious prophecy and apocalyptic theology to justify the United States' military actions in Iran."

Lawmakers want to know whether Hegseth's "extreme religious rhetoric has metastasized into segments of the military chain of command" in ways that violate the Constitution and DoD regulations.

What triggered this? Over 200 service members across 50 installations and every military branch filed complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reporting that their commanders told them the Iran war is divinely ordained, that Trump was chosen by Jesus to bring about Armageddon.

Seriously❗

Hegseth sponsors a weekly White House Bible study and has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military. His monthly Pentagon prayer gatherings have featured Doug Wilson, a far-right Christian nationalist who has defended slavery and called for America to become a theocracy.

The Democrats laid out six specific areas for investigation, from whether commanders violated DoD religious neutrality policies to whether whistleblowers faced retaliation. The Pentagon offered no direct response when asked about the complaints.

The Constitution is crystal clear: service members swear an oath to defend a secular republic, not to carry out anyone's end-times fever dream.

If the Secretary of Defense is turning the world's most lethal fighting force into a Christian dominionist project, that's not just a policy failure, it's a national security crisis, potentially even a global one.

Maine Writer Response: This radical religion strategy failed during the Crusades, Hitler invoked this as justification for the “final solution” and he failed, the Spanish Inquisition built a torture campaign around this myth but think about how many thousands of lives were lost to prove this strategy is never going to work❓ 

Meanwhile, the whack-a-mole reason behind this war changes with the ocean tides. Was the purpose regime change❓ Is this the fulfillment of Netanyahu’s long wished for war❓ Is the purpose to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities or is the purpose to bring Christianity to this eons old Iranian civilization❓ Multiple choice! Just my opinion❗

Donald Trump and maga Republicans deliberately reneged on the opportunity for a negotiated nuclear disarmament in Iran

One Crucial Reason We’re Talking About Boots on the Ground in Iran. (Maine Writer question❓How many body bags will be needed❓) New York Times Editorial by W. J. Hennigan and Masimo Calabrisi:

Somewhere in the mountains of Iran lies a hidden stockpile that is poised to define the future of America’s war against the theocratic regime: 18 to 20 scuba-tank-like canisters, each of which contains up to 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium, the main material for making a nuclear weapon.

Iran spent decades and billions of dollars amassing that material, prompting Democratic and Republican presidents alike to insist America would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Iran’s nuclear program has been severely damaged by U.S.-led air attacks over the past nine months. American officials and experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency believe the uranium has nonetheless survived.

That leaves no good options for a very urgent problem. The United States and Israel could dispatch special forces teams, with nuclear experts embedded in them, in the hope of finding, securing and removing or destroying the canisters, perhaps with the help of local insurgents. There have been few attempts to secure a nuclear program in the middle of a war, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how things could go terribly wrong.

The latest conflict, deliberately or otherwise, has forced the uranium issue to the fore, setting off a showdown over Iran’s nuclear future and a scramble to secure its components. If President Trump ends the war without getting control of the canisters, Iran will almost certainly speed toward going nuclear. Grabbing it, on the other hand, would entail huge risk and the inevitable deployment of American or Israeli ground forces.

“They have to deal with this,” said David Albright, the dean of Iran nuclear analysts and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank. The stockpile gives whoever emerges in power after the war “a residual nuclear weapons capability,” he said.

Diplomacy is the other approach. Weeks of bombing might force Iran to surrender its enriched uranium and other elements of its program. Intermediaries from Oman suggested recently that Iran might be willing to go this route, but that was before the latest attacks began. This is also not a new idea. One way or the other, America and Iran have been negotiating over this question for more than a decade.

The United States and Israel believe most of the highly enriched uranium is in a tunnel complex outside the city of Isfahan, which has not been the target of major bombing attacks during this campaign. “We’re always highly focused on” the uranium, the under secretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, said at the Council on Foreign Relations on March 4.

After Donald Trump’s decapitation of much of Iran’s leadership, the security of the stockpile is at risk. Converting the highly toxic material in the canisters into the metal for a weapon is probably beyond the abilities of terrorists, but rogue forces might view it as a decent insurance policy amid the chaos of war. The regime might try to disperse the canisters around the country for safekeeping. Iran has retained other parts of its nuclear program despite the relentless air attacks, and no matter what, the scientific knowledge underpinning the effort can’t be bombed away.

Donald Trump’s war against Iran triggered the most consequential nuclear moment in the Middle East in a generation. It’s no exaggeration to say the future of the region may well depend on whether the United States, having triggered the crisis, is successful in finding and securing the stockpile. Representative Bill Foster, Democrat of Illinois, who attended a classified briefing with administration officials on Tuesday, said Iran does “not need to enrich further to make a usable nuclear weapon. It’s true that what they have can’t be launched atop a missile, but unfortunately there’s different ways to deliver such a weapon.”

he confrontation over Iran’s enriched uranium has been building for years. Unlike in Iraq two and a half decades ago, when American intelligence agencies incorrectly argued that the country had a secret nuclear program, there is no doubt about Iran’s nuclear stockpile, which has been independently verified by the I.A.E.A. The organization significantly ramped up monitoring the country’s nuclear program in 2003.

Under the 2015, nuclear deal negotiated by the President Obama administration, Iran agreed to limit the enrichment of its uranium to less than 4 percent purity until 2030, in exchange for sanctions relief. The agreement was significant because it lengthened the breakout time it would take for Iran to produce a nuclear weapon to more than a year. Trump abandoned the deal in 2018, and within years, the Iranians began enriching their uranium beyond 20 percent, well higher than could be justified for civilian or scientific use, the I.A.E.A. reported. By the time the United States started its attacks last June, which were designed to debilitate Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran had amassed an estimated 970 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity.

That brought Iran within days of producing the 90 percent uranium necessary to fuel devastating nuclear weapons. Even 60 percent enriched uranium, when converted to metal, can be used for a crude weapon with roughly the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Shortly after Trump’s June attack, Iran kicked the I.A.E.A. inspectors out of the country, and the agency’s head, Rafael Grossi, has said he can no longer say for sure where the enriched uranium is. He assumed it remains at Isfahan, but he said at a March 2 news conference that “we hope it has not been removed.”

Knowing where to find the material is just the first challenge. Mr. Foster said after the classified briefing on Tuesday that the administration did not answer whether it had a strategy for dealing with the problem when it started the war. “We did not hear any plan from the administration to seize it, destroy it or make it subject to international inspection,” he told The Times.

The United States and Israel have the capability to secure Iran’s nuclear materials; this is one scenario in which there could be boots on the ground. Elite commando units among America’s special forces train to conduct high-risk operations to detect, seize and neutralize chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear threats. The United States maintains a system, called the Mobile Uranium Facility, that allows American scientists to quickly characterize, stabilize and package uranium. It’s made up of several shipping containers that can be loaded aboard military cargo planes and sent anywhere in the world from its current location in Tennessee at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Israeli special operations forces units have been training toward a mission to seize Iran’s nuclear material for more than a decade, according to several former U.S. government officials. 

Israel’s ability to conduct such raids came into public view in September 2024, when commandos stormed a Hezbollah facility in Syria, rappelling from helicopters to get to rooms that were buried deep in a mountainside. “Putting troops on the ground to remove this material is an option,” said Richard Nephew, an Iran nuclear expert who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “But it’s highly risky.”

Securing the nuclear stockpile after the bombs stop falling would be much easier. The United States and the United Nations have experience in such operations. Even then, it would be a daunting challenge to account for Iran’s nuclear material in all its forms, as well as whatever remains of centrifuges and related equipment involved in the program. “The list of objectives gets long fairly quickly,” said a former Iraq weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States devised a disarmament program that stretched across 15 sovereign states, involving 30,000 nuclear weapons and an estimated 40,000 tons of chemical weapons. The lesson there was that securing the nuclear material was only the start. It will be important to have a full accounting for the machinery, technicians and scientists involved to prevent problems popping up elsewhere. “What we don’t want is a post-Soviet Union environment where people with nuclear expertise are in the wind,” said Corey Hinderstein, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s deputy administrator for nonproliferation in the Biden administration.

The biggest obstacle to the peacetime approach — beyond the fact that the United States and Israel continue to attack Iran around the clock — is the Iranian regime itself. Trump launched the war amid negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. (IOW the negotiations were a ruse❗) That would make talks based on trust hard to restart. And after years of on-again, off-again diplomacy and enormous military attacks, Iran’s leaders might well have concluded that their only true guarantee for staying in power is to acquire a nuclear weapon as soon as possible.

There is a third possibility, of course. The war could end with Iran’s nuclear capabilities intact. That outcome looks even less appealing now than it did over the past few decades, in which one American president after another swore to prevent it. The regime’s track record of targeting the United States and its allies around the world would only get worse with the protection a nuclear arsenal would provide.

In a war filled with open questions, the fate of the Iranian uranium canisters is a terribly concrete determinant of what the future holds. The nuclear question is likely to be the most consequential one, however it is solved. That may be the most reckless part of Trump’s attack on Iran: forcing a final resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue with no clear path to success.

Comment from Norman Barnes in Seattle:  What a mess this all is now. It’s worth remembering that it was Netanyahu who was the biggest opponent of the nuclear deal negotiated in part by the Obama administration together with Iran which included key European nations.  And despite the fact that inspection of Iranian facilities showed they had abided by the agreement, it was

Netanyahu who goaded and prodded Trump into foolishly abandoning it. And here we are. It will take more than special operations missions to take and hold sites where Iran may have uranium buried.

Trump begins his "bloodbath" campaign driven by revenge and desperation

The bloodbath Trump promised has begun.

Former president Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally on March 16, in Vandalia, Ohio. (Scott Olson/Getty Images in The Washington Post)

Echo opinion by Dana Milbank published in The Washington Post "Democracy Dies in Darkeness:

These are difficult times for American Jews, facing a wave of antisemitism from the far left because of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7, attack. 

And now, in one of Trump’s first acts since clinching the Republican presidential nomination, he has decided to attack American Jews from the right. Dayenu! ✡️(The song is about being grateful to God for all of the gifts given to the Jewish people, such as taking them out of slavery, giving them the Torah and Shabbat.)

Compounding the insult was where Trump made it: On the podcast of his former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, who went to a Trump inaugural ball wearing the medal of Vitezi Rend, a far-right Hungarian nationalist group with Nazi roots. Gorka said he wore the decoration to honor his late father and isn’t a member of the hateful group; its officials have said otherwise.

Now that (unbelievably😳❗) Trump has locked up the nomination, we’re in for seven months of this ugliness before the election — and potentially four more years of it if that election goes badly. But fear not, dear reader: I will watch Trump so you don’t have to.

“Right,” Gorka said as Trump went on with his rant. “Yeah … yeah.”

Trump disparaged millions of American Jews in the service of propping up his fellow aspiring autocrat Benjamin Netanyahu, the deeply unpopular Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu is clearly prolonging the war in Gaza because when the fighting there ends he will likely be voted out of power and held to account for the government failures that led to October 7.

Because American Jews (like many Israeli Jews) want to end the Netanyahu nightmare, they hate their religion and the Jewish State? The chutzpah (extreme self-confidence or audacity.)

In the torrent of crazy and dangerous utterances coming from the man, we tend to bounce from one to the next. I will attempt to pause at week’s end to build a record of his greatest (or, rather, worst) hits so there will be no doubt about what Trump would do if returned to the White House. His apologists once said that Trump should be taken seriously but not literally❓ From experience, we now know to take him literally: Fact is, Trump is going to do, or at least try to do,
what he says.

As the general election campaign begins, Trump isn’t doing much campaigning. While President Biden is barnstorming the country, Trump visited only one battleground state since Super Tuesday, instead playing golf, making voluntary court appearances and granting interviews to friendly outlets from his Mar-a-Lago residence. This might be because he’s broke.

Trump's campaign is struggling to raise both small- and large-dollar contributions, and donations have been diverted to cover his legal bills. Last Saturday’s rally had been planned for Arizona, but Trump’s campaign moved it to Ohio, where a group affiliated with Senate candidate Bernie Moreno agreed to foot the bill. Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, said this week that he doesn’t have enough cash to post a bond for the $464 million judgment against him for business fraud, after asking about 30 insurance companies to underwrite the bond.

If Trump, for all his self-proclaimed business acumen, isn’t a good risk for 30 different insurers, how could he possibly be a good risk for the country?

So what did Trump  say over the last week?

• He said that certain immigrants are “not people” but are in fact “animals” and “snakes.” 
• He affirmed his view, seemingly lifted from “Mein Kampf,” that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” 
• He said his plan for mass deportations, modeled after “Operation Wetback” of the 1950s, “will be very evident” and “will go very quickly.”
• He saluted those who have been duly convicted of attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021, calling them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” 

I continue to ask this?  With all the videos released about January 6th, nothing yet shown reveals who constructed this "Hang Mike Pence" gallows. This construction was not serendiptous. It had to have been planned and the tools to construct it were carpentry grade. Who paid for it? Who built it?

Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, who those “patriots” wanted to kill on January 6, called that language “unacceptable” and told CBS News that he “cannot in good conscience” support Trump. 

In that principled refusal Pence is joined by GOP Sens. Todd Young (Ind.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Mitt Romney (Utah).

• Trump suggested that he would support a nationwide abortion ban. “The number of weeks now, people are agreeing on 15, and I’m thinking in terms of that,” he told WABC radio.
• Trump said his former adviser Peter Navarro, who reported to prison this week after being convicted of contempt of Congress, was “treated very badly” by the legal system. 
• And he said his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, convicted of bank and tax fraud related to his work for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, is “another person that was treated badly, and he was a patriot.” 

The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reports that Manafort will likely return as a Trump adviser this year. Trump went on a show hosted by the anti-immigrant British politician Nigel Farage, where he threatened to expel the Australian ambassador to the United States and said he might deport Prince Harry. 

But asked whether Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is a person he could negotiate with, Trump replied: “Yeah, I think he is.”

Oh, and he said this at a rally in Ohio: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” He was speaking in the context of automobile imports. But given his history of provoking actual bloodshed, this was small reassurance.

Trump routinely criticizes Biden for allegedly having a light schedule and declining mental faculties, but the presumptive Republican nominee struggled mightily at his only campaign event of the week.

“We want to have a rock-solid majority in the Senate,” he told the crowd. “We want to take over the House,” he added, apparently forgetting that the Republicans already control the House.

Trump used to boast that “I don’t use teleprompters,” even arguing that “if you run for president, you shouldn’t be allowed to use teleprompters.” But, when Trump suffered a teleprompter malfunction because of windy weather outside Dayton, OH, he was lost.