The Lynching of Pete Hegseth

The bloodthirsty Left is not going to let go of the accusations against Pete Hegseth, the choice of President-elect Trump for the Department of Defense. It’s ironic that legislators are hellbent on disqualifying Hegseth, given that many of them have been bailed out with taxpayer funds for their own indiscretions:

The effort to hunt down secret settlements involving state lawmakers began in November after reporters revealed recent cases in which taxpayer money was used to settle sexual harassment claims against members of Congress.

But what about Hegseth?

The latest news comes from the City of Monterey:

The 22-page report, released by the city attorney’s office of Monterey, California, on Wednesday night in response to a public records request, lays out the competing narratives of what happened in new detail – including conflicting accounts of how intoxicated Hegseth and the woman were, and descriptions of video surveillance showing some of their movements that night.

So we can indulge our curiosity about what actually happened, or we can look behind the accusations that were made. After all that was said and done, no charges were filed against Hegseth. Why did he pay her off later on?—

After the woman hired an attorney a couple of years later to consider a lawsuit, both parties reached an agreement. [His attorney Timothy]Parlatore noted in his statement to the Post that the MeToo movement was gaining momentum at the time, and he told CBS News that Hegseth would have faced ‘an immediate horror storm’ had he been publicly accused of sexual assault, a quote that Parlatore confirmed to NPR.

Hegseth was also concerned about how the incident might affect this job at Fox News.

There’s no arguing that the situation shows poor judgment on the part of both Hegseth and the woman involved. Since the situation is now in the open, lawmakers who are considering him for the DOD Secretary position need to sincerely ask themselves whether or not he should be disqualified. His credentials are impressive:

Hegseth’s military background began with the ROTC program at Princeton. After graduating, he served at Guantanamo Bay with the New Jersey Army National Guard until 2005. The following year, he was deployed to Iraq with the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, where he served as an infantry platoon leader and later as a civil-military operations officer in Samarra.

He returned to active duty in 2012 as a captain with the Minnesota Army National Guard and served as a senior counterinsurgency instructor at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul. Currently, Hegseth holds the rank of major in the Individual Ready Reserve and has been awarded two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantryman’s Badge for his overseas service.

On veterans’ issues, Hegseth has been an outspoken advocate. From 2007 to 2010, he served as the executive director of Vets for Freedom, a nonprofit organization aimed at educating Americans on the importance of achieving success in Iraq and Afghanistan based on direct knowledge of military strategy and tactics in these regions.

In 2012, Hegseth became CEO of Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), identified by the National Review as the nation’s largest center-right veterans’ group. He left CVA in 2015.

But credentials are not everything. The question about his character must also be asked:

Has he learned the importance of integrity in relationships? Can he be expected to fulfill the new role with dignity and appropriateness?