Amid horror, Hegseth takes his casting cues from Fox News founder Roger Ailes

This week, CBS News published a set of devastating photographs that active-duty service members leaked anonymously because, they said, the rigid media restrictions inside the U.S. military wouldn’t let them tell the truth about what’s going on in the Middle East.The images are ugly. A Boeing E-3 Sentry at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia with its tail blown off, wreckage at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, base after base across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan absorbing seven months of Iranian missiles and drones.Those are haunting pictures of the reality of the war that is being shielded from Americans. So naturally, Pete Hegseth only wants you to see pretty things.The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the Pentagon is instructing commanders to nominate only the fittest, best-groomed troops to appear at Hegseth’s upcoming "State of the Force" address.Pete wants his boys to meet requirements involving waist-to-height ratios and fitness levels, everything short of requesting Speedo pics. Somewhere between the burned-out E-3 and the rusted-out USS Abraham Lincoln, Hegseth has demanded that he not look at an audience of "fatties."Related: The despair on the USS Abraham Lincoln exposes the deadly fraud of Pete Hegseth’s machismoAs a gay man, I am beginning to wonder about Hegseth’s unending obsession with pretty boys. At Quantico last September, he stood in front of the Marine Corps’ top brass and announced there would be “no more beardos” and no more “fat generals” because it was “tiring,” in his words, to look out at formations and see anyone who wasn’t beefcake.And what on Earth was up with those testosterone screenings for every service member over 30? In a video fit for Pornhub, he boasted about his “High-T Department of War.” You can, of course, read that two ways.Then, the program disappeared, likely thrown into a metaphorical biohazard bin as bad “lethal” ideas usually do.Hegseth famo