Pete Hegseth is being Kavanaughed. And the only people dumb enough to fall for it are Republican senators.
I was willing to hear arguments that Hegseth wasn’t the best choice for secretary of defense. In his 40s, he’s on his third marriage, and while the rape allegation from his visit to a conservative conference in Monterey is clearly false, I was wide open to the argument that his actions demonstrated poor judgment. I was prepared to hear an argument. Like many combat veterans, Hegseth had some post-war chaos in his life. Discussion was merited.
But the more these arguments have been made, the dumber they’ve become. We’ve seen this play, and we know the third act: more heat, less light, the descent into completely irrational ranting.
Let’s pretend to take this number at face value, for the sake of argument, though Warren is egregiously misrepresenting the estimate about unreported assaults. Let’s just look at the structure of the claim: In 2023, while Lloyd Austin was the secretary of defense, 29,000 troops were sexually assaulted. Therefore, Pete Hegseth must never become the secretary of defense.
This is the kind of argument people make when they’re piling on in an atmosphere of hysteria. It has no logic or order to it, and it does the opposite of the thing it’s intended to do: It depicts current leadership as failures while arguing against a course correction. Bob punched me in the face, which proves that John is very bad. This is currently the logical structure of half the “news.”
In another Martha-do-you-hear-yourself moment, Lloyd Austin himself recently attacked Hegseth for arguing that women shouldn’t serve in the combat arms:
But read this carefully, and look for the own-goal:
In a speech rife with references to his own combat experience in Iraq, where he won the Silver Star, Austin called out women as fearless in their service.
“Those women didn’t flinch,” said Austin, recounting the 2003 advance to Baghdad. “They were facing the same dangers as the men. In fact, they were facing more. And in no uncertain terms, they were telling me to stop talking and get to the fight.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Lloyd Austin’s replacement, former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, has said that women should not serve in combat units. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated,” he said on a podcast in November.
Women serving in combat are facing more danger than men, Austin said.
Therefore, women should serve in combat. Explain the logic, Lloyd. Amazingly, the journalist who reported Austin’s comments missed the implications, mindlessly typing up the claim that women in combat are in more danger than men, then — next paragraph! — framing that statement as a rebuke to someone who warned that the service of women in combat “made fighting more complicated.” We’re not discussing; we’re ritually lining up behind our teams.
So.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that — brace yourself for this — pEtE hEGseTh drInKs BeeRRRR OH NO:
Several years ago, during a St. Patrick’s Day segment on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” support staff at the cable news network set up a display of beers for a holiday segment on the show. After the segment aired, Hegseth walked by the display table and drank each beer, according to two former colleagues who witnessed the incident and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive episode. The incident struck the colleagues as jarring for two reasons: One, the displayed drinks had been sitting out for hours and were stale and warm; two, the show wraps up at 10 a.m., an early hour for alcohol consumption.
Welcome home, Carrie Nation. We missed you.
So Pete Hegseth drank beer. And several people witnessed the incident! And my goodness, if there’s one thing a newspaperman won’t tolerate, it’s the consumption of intoxicants. Same for members of Congress, by the way. They’re all very sober all the time.
Same vibe from Hegseth here:
The world of Pete Hegseth is so dark and twisted that he sometimes openly drinks a glass of whiskey with other men. This is the pearl-clutchingest pearl-clutching in the history of pearl clutching.
I keep looking, in all of these reports about Hegseth’s scandalous consumption of alcohol, for a claim that he failed some form of duty because he was drinking: the day he couldn’t go on the air, the day he missed a formation, the day his troops trained without him because he was drunk. I have yet to see that claim in any form, anywhere, ever. In fact, people who have worked with him are very clearly saying the opposite, putting their names behind their insistence that they never saw him drunk on the job.
Meanwhile, Hegseth is saying the one thing that needs to be said, and saying it with great clarity and consistency:
I conclude that Pete Hegseth ran wild for a while after he went to war, which is a real shocker, and I conclude that he has his sh-t together and knows what needs to be done. It would be a significant failure for Senate Republicans to fail to confirm the man for secretary of defense. Already, a month after a significant political victory and a major inflection point, Republican officeholders are becoming our biggest obstacle to success. Again.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.”
Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of “Court-Martial: How Military Justice Has Shaped America from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond,” published last year by W.W. Norton.
Jesus Christ is King
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