He’ll no longer tolerate sharing a network with certain unnamed hosts who have never served their country cynically running interference for Trump by blaming every problem he has on the “Deep State.”

Which can mean only one thing.

When did the Deep State get to Col. Ralph?

I swore to “support and defend the Constitution,” and that oath did not expire when I took off my uniform. Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.

In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. When prime-time hosts–who have never served our country in any capacity–dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller–all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of “deep-state” machinations– I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.

As a Russia analyst for many years, it also has appalled me that hosts who made their reputations as super-patriots and who, justifiably, savaged President Obama for his duplicitous folly with Putin, now advance Putin’s agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign. Despite increasingly pathetic denials, it turns out that the “nothing-burger” has been covered with Russian dressing all along. And by the way: As an intelligence professional, I can tell you that the Steele dossier rings true–that’s how the Russians do things.. The result is that we have an American president who is terrified of his counterpart in Moscow.

I wish he’d been more specific about who he has in mind. Fox’s response: “Ralph Peters is entitled to his opinion despite the fact that he’s choosing to use it as a weapon in order to gain attention. We are extremely proud of our top-rated primetime hosts and all of our opinion programing.”

This is a guy, by the way, who once called Obama a “total pussy” on air. He’s not a liberal (well, not usually), even if he does think Trump’s fascination with having a big military parade is silly and sort of pathetic. Bear that in mind going forward, as he’s probably booking a “Fox sucks” farewell tour on the hard-left/center-left media circuit as we speak. The inevitable Maddow/Peters interview practically writes itself.

Why didn’t he just become a special contributor to Shep’s show and avoid the more state-media precincts of the line-up? Shep seems to hate primetime almost as much as Peters does. There are various hosts on the network who still seem to work for Fox rather than for Trump. Plus, if Peters had hung around long enough to see Democrats take back the White House, he’d have been able to watch primetime transform back into a bulwark of super-patriotism in which all who serve the military and law enforcement are good and the liberals who sporadically criticize them are traitors. Doesn’t he want to be there when Hannity inevitably starts treating Julian Assange as an enemy again?

Here’s Peters’s most famous moment on the air, from 2015. Obama sure showed him by doing next to nothing about Russia’s campaign interference a year later, huh?