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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?
Published in Domestic Policy
He’s like the Biblical David. A sinner and a warrior.
I like that! What a great comparison! I don’t like the things he’s done, and I’m assuming he has done many of the actions documented, but I still think he’d make a great Secretary of the DoD.
Liberals, like their Patron Devil, always resort to their satanic rules listed out by Alinsky – it doesn’t matter who the nominee is, they will attempt to destroy them, by any means.
When a woman sues years later for a single drunken tryst, the defendant is guilty of poor judgment even if for only selecting the company of that woman and in such circumstances. I have known some media and political types who seemed to live for this kind of reckless adventure and I was eternally surprised that their lives did not blow up in scandal.
The allegations are not of a criminal nature but not a positive look either. My guess is that just like the hearings for Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh, not just continued extreme spin of fairly innocuous events but the sudden emergence of some entirely fictional misadventures is to be expected. Harris is gone but there are still almost as unprincipled partisan hacks willing to deploy such lies.
Mollie Hemingway explains why the DOJ dropped its investigation…
Credibility issues you ask?. Pray tell…
Mollie goes into detail about Greenberg’s guilt of the very things of which he is accusing Hegseth.
Edit: Oops. Gaetz, not Hegseth, is the subject of this article. Thanks for setting me straight, Susan.
I heard her on her podcast this morning. Unfortunately, she’s talking about Gaetz, not Hegseth.
I put this comment on another post. But I think it’s relevant here as well:
That got a LOL from me! Yes!
The honey trap is a variation of a very old* con called the “badger game.” That might have been the original intent of the wife/husband team.
Not the kind of thing a prudent man should fall prey to, but we all make mistakes.
* Once again, Wikipedia is correct in general but weak on details.
Let’s be crystal clear about the test being applied: either (a) you are a tried and true swamp creature, in which case you will be waved through as a ‘safe pair of hands’, or (b) you are possessed of a character so unimpeachable that saints blush in your presence. And we wonder why things ratchet down.
I’m not relying on Wikipedia. Just on experience.
I wasn’t relying on it either. I was looking for a description that was accurate because I am currently too lazy to type it out. The badger game is basically using sex (or the promise of it) to generate blackmail material. With a straight badger game, the money that can be realized from this is the goal. With a honey trap, the blackmail material itself is the goal.
I knew about this from a very young age. My grandfather had a book titled Scoundrels and Scallywags which provided me with an education in all sorts of skullduggery.
Probably not the kind of education an eight year old should receive, but Grandpa was a troublemaker. The orange tie he wore every St. Patrick’s Day was evidence enough of that.
Another funny memory: Dad standing in one of the most Irish areas of Boston, on St. Patrick’s Day 1964, with a hat in front of him into which passers-by threw quarters and dollar bills, while he sang “The Old Orange Flute.”
Times change. Sometimes we don’t like it, but they do.
Grandpa would have ponied up a buck.
Why do people on our side empower Democrats to use sexual allegations, often fabricated or exaggerated against us? You know it is coming. It is step 1 in their playbook.
Read this if you have access
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/pete-hegseth-is-right-for-the-dod/
And using our own morals against us is one of the tactics.
It is relevant. It shows the patterns of lies the Democrats can be expected to employ.
And then there is this:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pete-hegseth-is-a-disruptive-choice-for-secretary-of-defense-thats-a-good-thing/
Written by:
He makes this important point:
The Us military is wholly unaccustomed to members who engage in extra-marital encounters – much less encounters that involve alcohol – and I cannot imagine the degree to which this will overwhelm the delicate sensibilities of our enlisted ranks.
I don’t think the Blasey Ford example is all that relevant. She couldn’t even convincingly demonstrate that any encounter of any sort between the two of them had even taken place when they were teenagers, there were no credible witnesses, there were his strenuous denials, and there was the lack of any corroborative evidence that he was a man, even in his youth, of questionable moral character (despite all those subsequent accusations from one nutjob after another, each more absurd than the last). Then, there is the fact that Kavanagh, always still under a microscope, has lived a scandal-free life married to the same woman now for twenty years.
Unfortunately, Hegseth brings his own china shop with him when it comes to his personal life. And although he denies the rape accusation, there’s no argument here as to time or place, or that the two of them had sex. Both of their stories, which sometimes match up, and sometime diverge, contain periods of different periods of “I don’t remember,” which isn’t helpful to either of them. There are several witnesses, both at the gathering and outside, on the street, to the fact that Hegseth was extremely drunk, while the woman seemed in control of herself. There is video of the two of them which appears to corroborate this. There are pages of texts in the police record between the woman and her husband (who was in the same hotel as this gathering, with his children, while his wife was in bed with Hegseth down the hall somewhere.)
All this took place a month or so after Pete’s second wife filed for divorce, and two months after his girlfriend had given birth to his seventh child.
I don’t actually buy the rape accusation, I can see why the police took no action, and I even get the sense that Hegseth may have been set up. But I cannot help feeling that a nominee for SecDef who drinks to the point that portions of his memory are blacked out, and who is susceptible to anything in a skirt who’s in close proximity, even if the one he has sex with is not the one in the crowd he originally targeted (that’s in the police report), and when at least some of the details in both their stories are (sometimes too graphically) quite similar, that nominee is going to have a rough time under questioning as to his fitness for the office.
And simply calling it all “the usual lies, lies, lies,” isn’t a strategy and isn’t going to make it go away.
I don’t know if anyone on the Trump team has spoken to the specifics, but I’ve heard several reports that this didn’t come up in Hegseth’s interviews before he was nominated. That’s unfortunate, too.
https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/the-left-cant-handle-hegseths-combat-stance
The number one reason the left opposes him – per Horowitz, is his objection over women in combat. Who is most angered by his stance? Per Horowitz, it is those who push the transgender experiment [the critical theory Marxists], the people blurring the sexual differences.
Per me, the last reason they would be opposing him is sexual behavior. You let them pick off one of Trump’s fighters. You better draw the line there or it will never end. Either they will dig up something or they will make it up. Hegseth cares enough about the war on warriors that he wrote a book about it. He isn’t about to ruin his chance of making historical reform by chasing women while in office. Please be smarter than the left.
Another reason they oppose him is his promise to rid the services of DEI.
The door for change doesn’t open widely, and it closes quickly. Don’t blow it.
I don’t care, as long as he gets the job done . . .
Susan if they have to dig until Trump can find someone with military experience who has had sex with only one person their whole life after these 40 years of sexual liberation you quite possibly could end up with me as Secretary of Defense and you don’t want that. (However, you might have to defend me for the parking ticket I got in ~2004. )
For the record, I don’t know what to think about Pete Hegseth and his nomination. I had never heard of him before his nomination, and haven’t heard anyone’s opinion, pro or con, that I am willing to adopt as my own. So I’m just a spectator on this one. For now, anyway.
If you want to know why Trump picked him, read his book, War on Warriors. That is the second book of his that I have read. The first was on fixing education.
The Megan Kelly podcast is very good and brutal analysis. He’s not that great of a person, but she is really full of crap.
The record suggests that Hegseth yields to sexual temptation more often than he should. A significant fraction of my half of our species shares this defect — a double-digit percentage, certainly, though I don’t know that it’s more than half (but suspect it might be).
I don’t consider this disqualifying. While I always respected Mike Pence for his commendable caution regarding the fairer sex (i.e., his reported habit of never dining alone with a woman other than his wife), I understand the unique nature of the sex drive and I believe that a man can be effective, conscientious, and dutiful despite failures in this regard.
I’m open to the possibility that this is a wrong-minded and self-serving extension of charity on my part, but I’ll continue on the assumption that it is not.
Based on having read The War on Warriors, I think Pete Hegseth has made a correct diagnosis of a critical problem faced by our military today, its recent pivot away from recruiting men and building soldiers and toward a self-destructive mission of pandering to identity-obsessed race baiters and fetishists. I also think he understands how to fix this problem and brings the intelligence, knowledge, skills, and motivation required to implement essential changes. Further, I think he’ll actually make his best effort to achieve that goal.
All of this despite past (and, to be completely fair, perhaps future) sexual indiscretions.