Sour Grapes Is Not a Moral High Ground
International legal experts—people who have spent decades parsing maritime law, sovereignty claims, treaties, and the laws of armed conflict—cannot agree on the legality of the recent strikes against cartels near Venezuela. These are specialists. This is what they do. And they are still arguing about it.
So naturally, Senator Mark Kelly decided that rank-and-file servicemembers should sort it out based on a 90-second video lecture about “following lawful orders.”
Being a retired Navy Captain and an astronaut is impressive, but it does not make you the last word on international law. This is not civic education. It is performative nonsense—sour grapes dressed up as a sermon.
The Lecture Nobody Asked For
The military does not need reminders from out-of-power politicians about what constitutes a lawful order. The military operates under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a framework vastly more rigorous than anything governing the people making these videos. Servicemembers have legal officers, commanders, protocols, and decades of institutional precedent guiding them. They know their duties. They know them better than the consultants producing slick videos for Twitter engagement.
So if the message wasn’t actually for the military, who was it for?
It was for the public. And not in a constructive way. It was a way to hint at impropriety without evidence, to sprinkle implications of illegality while maintaining plausible deniability, and to frame the video’s creators as moral guardians even after they lost direct influence over the institutions they are lecturing.
When you can’t govern, you grandstand. When you’ve lost authority, you reach for moral posturing as a substitute. This video wasn’t about principle, democracy, or the rule of law. It was about reclaiming relevance after forfeiting it.
The Real Damage
Let’s be direct about why they lost that authority. Inflation didn’t climb to nine percent by accident, and the border didn’t collapse on its own. Governance failed. The public noticed. Elections have consequences, and so does incompetence.
But here is what makes this video worse than ordinary political theater: it damages something genuinely valuable.
The American military is one of the few remaining institutions that has maintained an apolitical tradition. Servicemembers serve the Constitution, not a party. They follow lawful orders from whoever the civilian leadership happens to be, regardless of which party occupies the White House. This tradition isn’t just important—it is foundational to how civilian-military relations work in a democracy.
Dragging servicemembers into partisan rhetorical battles corrodes that tradition. It puts them in an impossible position: either they are being told their commanders are issuing unlawful orders (with zero evidence), or they are being used as props in a political dispute that has nothing to do with them. Neither is acceptable.
The people making these videos don’t seem to care. They aren’t thinking about institutional damage or the position they are putting servicemembers in. They are thinking about engagement metrics and the dopamine hit of feeling righteous.
That isn’t moral leadership. That is narcissism with a flag pin.
Earn It
Now, predictably, we hear cries of “unprecedented retaliation” when there is pushback. We are told the FBI is being weaponized. But somehow the unprecedented grandstanding that started this—a sitting senator using his military credentials to publicly question the lawfulness of orders given to servicemembers—doesn’t count?
You don’t get to throw punches at the chain of command and then claim victimhood when the system swings back.
If politicians want the public’s respect back, they should earn it the way anyone else does: by doing their jobs well. Not by grandstanding. Not by preaching. Not by lecturing people who already know their duties far better than the people making the videos.
Sour grapes is not a moral high ground. Voters can see right through it. And so can the troops.