All American Armed Forces personnel, our Mark Alexander has noted, “have written a blank check made payable to ‘The People of the United States of America’ for an amount up to and including their lives.” In the meantime, they often eat MREs — meals ready to eat — which let’s just stipulate aren’t exactly gourmet. Yet the American Leftmedia is appalled about a supposedly new revelation that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth spent $24 million last fall feeding our troops steak, lobster, and crab.

Let them eat cake, scoff the elitist scribes. Don’t let those stinky soldiers eat our supply of cocktail shrimp.

The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles humorously summed up some of the outrage:

“Almost $7 million in lobster!” fumed Jessica Sidman, food editor of Washingtonian magazine. Mediaite reported that Hegseth “blew” millions on steak and lobster. Molly Jong-Fast, an anti-Trump commentator with ties to the Bulwark and MSNBC, slammed the “frivolous” expenditures on “luxury” food items. Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan sarcastically urged the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to look into Hegseth’s spending. “But SNAP recipients are the REAL problem,” Atlantic contributor Jemele Hill clapped back.

We spend roughly $100 billion a year on food stamps, so yeah, that is a REAL problem. (By the way, SNAP recipients often blow the money on Coke and candy bars.) It’s also a real problem that while leftists complain about surf and turf for the troops, they demand four-star hotels and meal cards for illegal aliens — people who shouldn’t even be in our country. Quite the contrast with people who give their lives to serve it.

“There are literally millions of children in Minneapolis who need this money to be able to attend Somali daycare,” The Babylon Bee satirically “quotes” Senator Chuck Schumer as saying.

Besides, feeding troops a nice meal is typical, especially right before deployment. National Review’s Luther Abel, himself a U.S. Navy Veteran, believes the outrage stems from the fact that so many in the Leftmedia and leftist elite “don’t know anyone in the military.” He writes, “Hundreds of the leading cultural, intellectual, and political lights haven’t an inkling of deployments, extensions, and separations, which means that they don’t know — or personally care about — anyone in uniform.” They’re also ignorant of the historic tradition of pre-battle feasting.

And for crying out loud, even the very lost David French gets it. “When I was in Iraq serving at a very remote FOB not far from the Iranian border, we had steak and crab legs almost every Sunday,” he wrote. “It was the military’s version of a thank you meal, and it was very appreciated. There are lots of things to be outraged at, but feeding our deployed troops well is not one of them.”

Besides being Trump-deranged lunatics and rabid left-wing activists, why else would Leftmedia pontificators be upset about nice meals?

Maybe because, ever since John Kerry’s defamatory 1971 Senate testimony accusing U.S. soldiers of heinous war crimes, they have believed our Armed Forces personnel are war criminals. Kerry told the Senate:

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

The only thing the treasonous Kerry proved is that he was unfit, but the Left took his lies to heart.

Which just happens to be a segue into the other Leftmedia outrage du jour.

This morning’s top story at the failing Washington Post is the Pentagon’s inquiry into a missile strike that hit an Iranian school “and killed at least 175 people, many of them children, according to Iranian state media.”

Much of the rest of the Leftmedia reported extensively on it, as well.

Even the Pentagon admits that the strike was likely a horrible mistake by the U.S. military. Initial reports are that the building was an approved strike target because it was misidentified as a factory or arms depot. The Post adds, “The school used to be part of an Iranian naval base and may still be affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy.”

Talk about burying the lede.

Did anyone in the Post’s newsroom stop to ask why Islamic regimes and military groups strategically mix schools and hospitals with military facilities?

Hamas, an Iranian proxy, does this all the time because jihadis hide behind strollers and the elderly infirm so as to maximize civilian casualties. Hegseth made exactly this point. “The mullahs are desperate and scrambling,” Hegseth said. “Like the terrorist cowards they are, they fire missiles from schools and hospitals, deliberately targeting innocents.”

Yet the Western media dutifully reports every time the Gaza Health Ministry or the Iranian state media says kids were killed, whether it’s true or not. By contrast, they disbelieved reports of the tens of thousands of Iranian protesters killed by the mullahs before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury.

It’s understandable that the Trump administration would be reluctant to admit such a mistake. Joe Biden’s administration was likewise loath to admit when a missile strike after the surrender and retreat from Afghanistan actually killed 10 innocent people, including seven kids.

Collateral deaths have always been a tragic part of war. The difference between the U.S. and the terrorists fighting against us in the Middle East is that we try to minimize such casualties. Hegseth said this, too: “Unlike our adversaries, the Iranians, we never target civilians.”

The Leftmedia may get some of the details of these stories correct, and there is certainly reason to lament a missile strike that killed schoolchildren. No American wants that, and as a father, my heart goes out to the Iranian parents who’ve lost children. I hope for whatever accountability is appropriate in our military.

Yet the legacy media is also utterly compromised by its gross left-wing bias that long precedes its Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s natural to distrust their reporting about military strikes like this. And when they think the Bad Orange Man is just like Hitler and American troops have been committing war crimes since the 1960s, it’s no wonder these contemptible elites are crabbing about lobster.

Follow Nate Jackson on X.