and they should be as free of stigma in exactly the same way the vaccinations are to those who understand the mortal danger that the worm-eaten sideshow Bob F. Kennedy Jr. represents to this country. It is a moral imperative that Joe Biden literally prioritize this list of pardons above everything else right now, everything else except perhaps his own consideration of the larger question that Trump's desire to purge anybody from the military who isn't personally loyal to him and Trump's desire to purge anybody from government who isn't personally loyal to him, and Trump's intention to starve any city or county or state that does not become personally loyal to him. Joe Biden must ask himself if it is morally defensible to turn this country over to a madman, not just talking about destroying this country and killing its people by astonishingly varietous means, but one who is already starting to make this happen. Joe Biden must ask if there are other actions to take rather than hand Trump the weapons with which to institute dictatorship and mass death. That is for the president and his conscience and his prayers and his God to decide. As for the immediate crisis before us right now, NBC News is reporting, quote, the Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior, current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan. Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason. They're taking it very seriously, the person with knowledge of the plan said. Matt Flynn, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counter narcotics and global threats is helping lead the effort. The sources said it is being framed as a review of how the U.S. first got into the war in Afghanistan and how the U.S. ultimately withdrew, unquote, quoting NBC News. The lawyer for this Flynn, this Flynn, denies any involvement in this or in the Trump transition team. The answer to how we got in, of course, is that George W. Bush correctly sent troops to Afghanistan after 9-11 to destabilize al-Qaeda's base there. And then he saw the chance to pretend that the real culprit was Iraq, and the mission was thereafter doomed to incompleteness. The answer to how we withdrew from Afghanistan, of course, is that in order to look like a peacemaker and to win a few votes somewhere, Trump made a nightmarishly bad deal with Taliban terrorists, having already invited them to go to Camp David, and arranged for 5,000 of their worst scum to be released from captivity, which left Afghanistan undefended, in essence, and left Joe Biden with no chance other than to get out as fast as he could. If there should be anybody on trial for malfeasance or misconduct or treason over the Afghanistan withdrawal, it is Trump. And that, of course, is part of the point. In a dictatorship, there is not just one man rule, but anybody but that one man blame. All those who recognize the dictator's failures must be silenced, and some of them must publicly take the fall for him, no matter how many lies must be told to make that happen. But even that is not the largest point. The largest point is that these are the first notes of the symphony of destruction that Trump intends. To create a commission is to create a kind of permanent platform for show trials. Show trials of the military first, because loyalty and conduct there are so easily assessed. Then, later, show trials for civilians in any field. The perpetual rooting out of supposed disloyalty and treason and not failure, but sabotage, has been part and parcel of every dictatorship since ancient Rome. It was the essence of the Soviet state. It was the backbone of Hitler's Reich. It was previewed for us in the endless hearings by Jamie Comer in the House of Representatives in the last two years. But still further, as NBC reports, to recall former military leaders in order to court-martial them is a step beyond. That is done to smear the entirety of the non-Trump history of this country, to make distinctions not just between Republicans and Democrats and Trumpists and never Trumpers, but between Trump and every other political and governmental figure in at least our recent history. If the NBC report is correct and the Afghanistan Star Chamber would address not just the withdrawal, but also the decision to go in, all of a sudden Trump's scapegoat hunters will be going after George W. Bush and the neocons and Liz Cheney's father and doing so for what might have been the one thing they actually got right. And even beyond that, there is in this the opening salvo in the attempt to do to the military what Trump has long since promised to do to the federal government and to local police around the country, to make them loyal to him and him alone. I'll quote again from the NBC story. It's not clear the Trump administration would pursue treason charges and instead could focus on lesser charges that highlight the officer's involvement. They want to set an example, said the person with knowledge of the plan. They would, in fact, be setting multiple kinds of examples, not just to military personnel who might hesitate someday to commit the illegal acts and murders. Trump will no doubt order through his minions, but also an example of how to frighten and purge and make political hay out of anybody in any public position and eventually in any private position in this country. This Afghanistan story is a blueprint for governmental terror in this country starting two months from Wednesday. This is why Biden must act immediately. Pardon anybody who will accept one. Blanket. Blanket pardons for all acts. I want so many pardons that they have to open up the government printing office 24-7. I want them so commonplace that each of my dogs gets one. And the onus is erased by the sheer number of pardon recipients. And yes, the president needs to pardon everybody in his own family, and in Bill Clinton's family, and Barack Obama's family, and Kamala Harris's family. And God knows how many other loyal families. Incidentally, it is not a coincidence that this obscure, greasy scumbag Hegseth, whom Trump wants as Secretary of Defense, wrote a book blaming Pentagon leadership for the heart-rending Afghanistan withdrawal. Hegseth is, as I record this, still Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, but it certainly looks like he is the first of the team of trifles that Trump would throw under the bus. The Washington Post reports that Hegseth, quoting them, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a non-disclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer Saturday and other documents obtained by the Washington Post. Hegseth agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter, quote, would result in his immediate termination from Fox, where he worked as a host, the statement said. The statement came after a detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by the Post, alleged he raped the then 30-year conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar, unquote. This all was said to transpire in 2017. This Hegseth has been on the ropes since trump leaked his name not the least for this series of tattoos generously described by vice president-elect vance as quote a christian motto tattooed on his arm less generously described as part of a series of tats including symbols used by the christian crusaders of the middle ages and more recently and more dangerously by the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters. The tattoos on Hegseth were so alarming he was flagged as an internal risk by a fellow service member and left the service as a result. Hegseth and his fellow cockroach Vance, whose entire understanding of the works and words of Jesus seems to be some garbled conclusion that you can get very popular if you seem to have been martyred, exchanged social media posts in which they dismissed the reporting of that little white supremacist convert or kill everybody in the Middle East issue as, quote, anti-Christian bigotry in the media, unquote. Hegseth then added exactly the kind of agenda-setting statement you would expect from an incoming head of the Pentagon, quote, they can target me, I don't give a damn, but this type of targeting of Christians, conservatives, patriots, and everyday Americans will stop on day one at DJT's DOD. Which you could dismiss as typical QAnon lunacy, except for the fact that the man who wrote that may actually yet wind up in control of the largest military force in the world, along with a remit from the man who appointed him to use that force against the citizens of the United States. Like maybe when the public were to protest treason show trials and presumably treason show executions of generals who were making the best out of Trump's butchering of our exit from Afghanistan. Hegseth may meet his bus, a bus named Crusade, not because he's an unqualified lunatic who's inked up like a fanboy of the Spanish Inquisition, but because it is human nature to think, well, we didn't stop Gates, but at least we got rid of Hegseth. As if there weren't another 50 Hegseths lined up behind the original. I mean, you could even give the new one the same tattoos. Wouldn't take more than a few days. Quote, Trump wants Gates confirmed 100 percent, a source told CNN. He is not going to back off. He's all in. Reads the money quote from a CNN report, which has Jamie Gangell's name and sources all over it. Quoting again, he views Gates as the most important member of the cabinet. He considers the nomination of the former Florida congressman an urgent priority for the incoming GOP majority in the Senate. It's the lady or the tiger here, I think. Notice the word used there was confirmed. Trump wants Gates confirmed 100 percent. Trump has always been so slipshod, so inherently confused by human language that confirmed by the Senate and confirmed as a recess appointment could in fact mean the same thing to him depending on the hour of the day and the day of the week. He may or may not still care that there's a difference between those things. But as I said last week, Gates is Trump's personal kind of favorite immoral cockroach. And yet he still means much more to him symbolically. He is Caligula's apocryphal horse appointment. Trump wants Gates to use the DOJ as a loaded gun against anybody Trump doesn't like. He doesn't care who gives him the gun. But Trump's ego also demands that the Republican senators he views as his slaves stand up and applaud what he's doing. In short, Gates is, and nobody better embodied this, Gates is the living embodiment of Trump saying, I will defecate, you will eat it. So there is your tiger. Right now, it is clear from all reporting, a majority of Republican senators would not vote to confirm Matt Gaetz. If there's a vote, if there's a hearing, Trump's utter insecurity can only be assuaged by a hearing and a vote. Does he continue to demand it? If he demands it, he may kill his dictatorship before it even starts. If he sublimates his desire and is satisfied, course of least resistance for these more advanced insects in the Senate Republican caucus think still cockroaches, but in suits and ties. Their course of least resistance is clear, letting the recess appointment happen and then just pretending as they have pretended for eight years, that Trump is not Hitler. I will echo what David French, of all people, wrote in the New York Times. America has twice elected Trump the outsider, the bull in the china shop, the chaos agent. But he has stood for office only once as the actual guy in charge, buck stops here guy. And America rejected him and humiliated him. In the long term, this could be a good auger. The United States may simply get fed up with Trump failing at everything. Or it could hasten his full implementation of dictatorship in which he never makes that mistake again. He never makes the mistake of letting America again have anything to say about who runs America. In which case, I refer you back to my opening remark. Joe Biden must immediately pardon everybody he can think of. Just in case this weekend was not worrisome enough, those Trump will not court-martial nor have Gates prosecute nor have Hegseth shoot, he will kill by accelerating the climate catastrophe. His new energy secretary-designate is not just a fossil fuels prostitute, he's a fracking prostitute. Liberty Energy's Doug Wright. Liberty from breathing, I believe, is their motto. Doug Wright's tombstone someday will read, there is no climate crisis and we're not in the midst of an energy transition either, which he said on tape. It will read that until that tombstone is submerged under a new ocean or burned to a cinder by a 500,000 acre wildfire.