If you’ve ever been to Pearl Harbor, you know that the area around the USS Arizona is revered. It is not a recreational dive site. It’s not some playground for pampered, spoiled, and pompous buffoons.
It is a military cemetery. Hundreds of American sailors and Marines are entombed beneath its rusted hull at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, where they have rested since Japan bombed and sank the battleship on December 7, 1941.
The wreck is accessible only by boat. Recreational diving is generally prohibited. Rare exceptions are made for marine archaeologists, National Park Service survey crews, and a ceremonial diver interring the remains of an Arizona survivor who wanted to spend eternity beside his shipmates.
And then there is America’s most despised frat-boy, Kash Patel.
The miserable excuse for an FBI director, already loathed for joy-riding on government jets and crashing the Olympic hockey locker room, thought he could brazenly slipbeneath the waters of the USS Arizona Memorial last August for an exclusive underwater tour of the sunken battleship.
Government emails obtained by the Associated Press through a public records request show that military officials coordinated logistics and personnel for what they internally called a “VIP snorkel.”
Marine veteran Hack Albertson, who dives the Arizona annually with the Paralyzed Veterans of America, put it plainly: “It’s like having a bachelor party at a church. It’s hallowed ground. It needs to be treated with the solemnity it deserves.”
Imagine being family members of Pearl Harbor survivors, loved ones who have never been permitted to swim at the site where their fathers died, and learning this week that the arrogant, spoiled Patel got a curated underwater tourism experience above their loved ones’ corpses.
Who does Patel think he is? If I were one of those family members, I’d be calling for his bulbous head.
While his behavior is vulgar and disgusting, his latest offense should come as no surprise. Just a week ago, we learned about Patel’s personally branded liquor bottles. He’s the FBI director, for God’s sake. The last thing he should be doing is handing out booze.
Then came word that the FBI had launched a criminal leak investigation targeting the journalist at The Atlantic who wrote a well-sourced article about his drinking.
That account alleged that Patel’s security staff, unable to reach him after an evening of drinking, had to breach a door to find him, and that his meetings were regularly being rescheduled later in the day because he was pathetically hungover.
Patel called it all lies and filed a $250 million defamation suit. Then he showed up to a Senate hearing this week and proved every word of the characterization true through his sheer fool behavior alone.
When Sen. Chris Van Hollen pressed himon the Atlantic report, Patel declared he would “not be tarnished by baseless allegations,” then accused Van Hollen of being “the only individual drinking on the taxpayer’s dime.”
The utter contempt and disdain the director of the FBI showed for a United States senator is the same contempt he showed for our World War II veterans.
But Patel’s sacrilegious snorkeling is just par for the course when it comes to Trump officials disrespecting the military. Pete Hegseth, again a miserable excuse for a defense secretary, is running a celebrity concierge service at the Pentagon.
Kid Rock, yet again, a miserable excuse for a musician, kicked off his latest concert tour on May 1 in Dallas with a promo video showing him leaving a private jet and entering an Army helicopter. An AH-64 Apache attack helicopter costs roughly $7,000 per hour to fly.
That wasn’t the only time the washed-up crooner took advantage of the U.S. military. In March, the U.S. Army investigated a low-altitude flyoverow-altitude flyover by two Apaches over Kid Rock’s Tennessee home, which he bragged about on social media. He said it wasn’t the first time that happened.
Again, the incident was an expensive misuse of military resources, and the star-struck Hegseth — who gets star-struck by Kid Rock? —quickly intervened to halt the investigation and overturn the aircrew’s suspension.
Patel and Hegseth’s shenanigans involving the military also include the White House’s response to the Iran war. Shockingly, Trump’s comms lackeys mixed real strike footage with clips from Grand Theft Auto, Wii Sports, and Call of Duty.
Since the war in Iran began, the official White House account has spliced real military footage with clips from Iron Man, Top Gun, and video games, including Wii Sports and Call of Duty.
All of this amounts to moral obscenity, framing the risking of human lives and deaths as something to brag about, toy with, and swim around.
Robert Ritchie, Kid Rock’s real name, is the son of a wealthy Michigan auto dealer and he never wore a uniform. Neither has Patel. And Hegseth, who did serve, should know better than to diminish the stature of the troops.
The fans scraping together nearly $5 a gallon for gas while driving home from Kid Rock’s show include military families. The families who cannot swim to their grandfathers’ graves have to watch a conceited moron desecrate those graves.
And the barely-adult 22-year-old soldier in Iran, who is being asked to possibly take a real bullet, gets reduced to a character in a video game.
Our military, which is nobly serving us, is being ill-served — and disrespected — by its leaders.
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