Former media boss delivers the most credible defense of Pete Hegseth so far

President Trump's defense secretary nominee, former combat vet Pete Hegseth, is having a hard time getting support for his confirmation in the Senate.

A raft of negative, and fantastical, stories are making the rounds in the press, each topping the next, claiming he was a hard drinking drunkard and a sex-harassing wencher in his long-ago or even recent past, rendering him unfit for the post of Secretary of Defense, as if the current crop of wokesters and chiselers were somehow what the voters really wanted when they cast their ballots for Trump.

None of these stories came out earlier, of course, but such is the state of things ahead of a confirmation of a conservative. Now the Senate has the unenviable task of trying to sort out the he-said, she-said element of the charges to determine whether he should be confirmed. I don't think they should bother.

Because nobody here is naive. Partisan considerations are the truth-determining engine for a lot of the creeps in those high offices sitting in judgment on Hegseth, and conflicts-of-interest with the defense lobbies are yet another, and for many, they overlap. 

Hegseth may not make it and if that happens, we will be treated to yet another round of posturing about 'democracy at stake' or some other nauseating smokescreen. The Wall Street Journal reports that President Trump may replace Hegseth with Florida's excellent governor, Ron DeSantis, which certainly could be a good thing.

Nevertheless, the smear campaign against Hegseth really needs to be addressed, regardless of that outcome.

Here's the best defense I've seen of Hegseth, from a former boss at Mediaite, which is the most middle-of-the-road of all news outlets.

In other words, they were out there. They were looking for people who matched the description now being attributed to Hegseth. Fox News leaked like a wet brown bag. They would have wrote something if they found something or heard something. They were already taking down big ones, like Roger Ailes, and they did it a lot. For them, it was their job and they did their job well.

But amid all this, Hegseth's name never came up.

Not once.

If something were happening, they would have heard about it.

But they never heard about it, and they had their eyes and ears everywhere, looking for just this sort of thing.

The implication of course, is that it didn't happen and what we see now is the same kind of treatment Brett Kavanaugh went through during his ordeal as Supreme Court nominee a few years ago -- a raft of phony stories not one of which were true.

Now this is not to say Hegseth, a decorated combat veteran might not have had difficulties readjusting to civilian life, as is common with men ordered into battle in no-win wars with incompetent commanders. It's possible he did. Maybe he drank and said inappropriate things to women.

But has he fixed these post-combat problems? Most reasonable people would give a certain amount of leeway to a decorated combat vet from George Bush's useless wars that cost America's fighting men their lives and sanity even as Beltway swamp consultants and contractors got rich.

But now even that is up for question, given the Mediaite boss's observation that if it was happening, he would have known about it.

That's the most credible defense of Hegseth I've seen. The doubters in the Senate ought to take that into account. There were watchers out there and Pete Hegseth never came up on their radar.

Image: 'X' screen shot

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com