I find myself looking forward to the daily missives from Mary Geddry, a very talented observer and journalist who can be followed on Facebook (Oregon’s Bay Area).

Her writing is complex and colorful, enough so that I fed some of her prose into a site designed to identify AI-produced essays. No AI here, was the report back.

So here’s an example, excerpted from today’s feed from Oregon’s Bay Area.

Let’s begin where decency compels us to: the bodies in the water.

What began Friday as a quietly horrifying Washington Post story detonated over the weekend into a rare moment of moral clarity: the U.S. military, under orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, killed two unarmed survivors clinging to boat wreckage after a first missile strike destroyed their vessel. A “double tap,” as if the U.S. Navy were reenacting a cartel execution.

The Former JAGs Working Group responded with the kind of icy precision you only get from people who have spent their lives reading war-crimes indictments in the original French. Their conclusion? The orders, “kill everybody,” followed by a second strike to kill the survivors, constitute war crimes, murder, or both. No hedging, no polite throat-clearing. Just the law, laid bare. A patently illegal order that every U.S. service member has a duty to disobey.

Adam Kinzinger, in an emergency video that should be required viewing for every American who thinks “toughness” means murdering drowning men, laid it out with military bluntness: This is the moral equivalent of shooting prisoners. It’s the kind of thing the U.S. condemned as a capital offense at Nuremberg.

In a move so rare you could bottle it as a collectible, the Republican chairs of both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees announced bipartisan investigations into the boat killings. The same Republicans who have spent the past year insisting Trump can do no wrong have suddenly discovered that maybe war crimes deserve a little follow-up.

Senate Chair Roger Wicker and House Chair Mike Rogers demanded the Pentagon’s legal rationale, which is a bit like demanding to see the blueprints for a house someone obviously set on fire. They’ve already warned the Pentagon that failure to comply violates statutory deadlines. Congress hasn’t sounded this annoyed since somebody suggested canceling August recess.

And here’s what makes this moment different: the bipartisan push itself is an indictment. It tells us two things.

First, Hegseth’s legal rationale is so thin that even Republicans won’t touch it.Second, the administration’s refusal to answer basic questions has reached a breaking point. The patience of even the most pliant GOP committee chairs has finally snapped.

One Republican aide, speaking off the record, put it in language refreshingly free of Washington varnish: this is the first time in years that Armed Services staff have encountered a Trump military operation that Pentagon lawyers “literally cannot defend on paper.”

The Pentagon, of course, responded by refusing to bring any lawyers to briefings, because when you are truly, magnificently guilty, you do not bring the person whose entire job is to use words like “illegal,” “indefensible,” and “please stop talking.”

Hegseth fled to X to declare that every trafficker “killed” was affiliated with a terrorist organization, a claim that is flawlessly untrue but perfectly on-brand for a man whose understanding of international law can be written on a Cracker Barrel napkin.