MARCH 26, 2025

Thirty years ago, this pilot, Kara Hultgreen, became the first Navy fighter pilot assigned to an aircraft carrier. She died in a crash in 1994. Naval and military aviation is dangerous.

Twenty-eight women pilots died in World War II  at a rate, if you need to know, and I think you do, far, far below their male counterparts, like the twenty-year-old  air cadets who came to these women for flying tips. I’ve written about these women. They matter to me.

(Above) World War II pilots Betty Pauline Stine (Santa Barbara High School); Hazel Ying Lee and Getrude “Tommy” Tompkins, all killed in 1944. Tompkins and her fighter plane, the elite P-51 Mustang, have never been found after disappearing in fog above Santa Monica Bay.

Last July, another Navy pilot became the first woman to score an air-to-air victory, shooting down a Houthi Drone over the Red Sea. She flew her F-18 Super Hornet off the USS Eisenhower’s flight deck.

Her name has never been revealed, for security reasons.

Above: Eisenhower and her escorts; an F-18 Super Hornet at the moment it breaks the sound barrier.

Today’s Cabinet meeting, after stunningly stupid bureaucrats at the top of the food chain had accidentally revealed the plans for this year’s strike on the Houthis, was, well, stunningly stupid. They blamed the editor of one of America’s oldest and most prestigious magazines— the “failing poet” Walt Whitman published in The Atlantic, for God’s sake—for the incident. In fact, the editor refused to publish the details because that might have cost the lives of young Navy pilots.

After the Airing of Grievances and the Feats of Strength and the Condemnation of the Principled, the bureaucrats at the top of the national food chain abased themselves in the presence of the president. The president’s national security advisor (the fall guy, even moreso than the Secretary of Defense, an alcoholic sexual predator) for this carelessness in the matter of young fighter pilots’  lives—delivered a speech so fulsome in its praise that the president became nearly Christlike. The president enjoyed this. Everyone around the Big Peoples’ table applauded.

A marked contrast in tone was adopted by the Secretary of Defense. At the time of the meeting, Pete Hegseth was landing at Joint Base Oahu. This is not a well man.

The day after this ad hominem attack, the editor of The Atlantic revealed the content of the texts exchanged. It became clear that none of the Cabinet or Cabinet-level bureaucrats is well. Not a one, including those who posted little flame emojis as the Houthis and their girlfriends were being incinerated.

What also became clear is how terrified all of them are of presidential advisor Stephen Miller, whose go-ahead set the attack into motion.

Miller has no military credentials. He does make war, however, on elderly Americans, nonwhite Americans, working-class Americans, teachers, judges, journalists, and on what Jefferson Airplane called, in the song “White Rabbit,” Logic and Proportion/Fallen sloppy dead.

While it was an American history moment, the Cabinet meeting was far more remindful of Stalin or Dear Leader, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. the father of the dictator that the president admires so much. In making 45/47 the infallible Captain of our Ship of State, the Cabinet, I think, secretly hoped for medals.