“Liberal media outlets have recently turned their focus to smearing President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, devoting significant time and energy to criticizing his casual beer-drinking habits, calling it ‘jarring.’ What should have been a celebratory moment for Hegseth and his family receiving the nomination from Trump has been blown out of proportion, with the left seizing on every opportunity to attack Hegseth for something so trivial. This relentless focus on his personal choices appears less about holding him accountable for any meaningful actions and more about attempting to discredit him through manufactured outrage to undermine Trump’s future cabinet,” says a piece published at right wing propaganda site TownHall.com on Friday.
Ughhhhhhhh… Apparently the name “Neera Tanden” doesn’t ring a bell if they want to talk about “something so trivial” but, as you can tell by the headline, it gets considerably fucking pettier.
Continues TownHall’s Sarah Arnold: “CNN ran several segments on Thursday highlighting a rare occurrence: Hegseth drinking beer during a Fox and Friends segment on St Patrick’s Day – one of the biggest drinking days of the year. The outlet highlighted a Washington Post article, which I covered, that claimed several former and current Fox News employees – all of which are ‘anonymous sources’ – have accused Hegseth of being drunk or drinking on the job. They pointed to an instance where the former news host enjoyed a few beers during its St Patrick’s Day special.”
Here’s how seriously Republicans took it the last time an anonymous source at a major national news network alleged improper and unprofessional behavior on the part of on-air talent:
Still no follow up on that hearing to investigate ABC News that MAGA Congressman Dan Meuser promised back in September. The other problem with Arnold’s bitching here is that if someone’s been alleged to show up to work drunk that you could do a lot worse than citing repeated instances of them drinking on camera, often between the hours of 6 and 9 AM, to corroborate said allegations.
And you could do better with the fact that Hegseth himself promised to senators to get sober if he’s confirmed as the United States Secretary of Defense. That was on Wednesday, two days before TownHall printed the piece, which was written as though there had been no such acknowledgement from the former Fox News host that yeah, maybe he kind of does have a serious drinking problem.
Moving on to the equivocation promised by the headline: “However, it was OK for CNN reporter Anderson Cooper and Bravo host Andy Cohen to get so drunk on-air during its New Year’s Eve special that they had to stop serving the hosts alcohol. In 2023, CNN CEO Chris Licht banned on-air talent from drinking during the NYE broadcast to improve the show’s credibility, saying he didn’t want hosts doing shots on-air. In 2017, disgraced former CNN host Don Lemon appeared intoxicated live on-air while getting his ear pierced. Meanwhile, in 2019, Cooper was taking shots on-air hours before the ball was scheduled to drop, saying, ‘It’s like burning your lungs.’ However, in 2024, Cooper brought the booze back to the show for its NYE special after staying sober the year prior.”
“Double standard, eh? These are the same people accusing Hegseth of being so-called ‘drunk’ on air,” Arnold writes in her closer, from which her editor possibly had to remove a “🖐🏻🎤” emoji combo.
Fuuuuuuuuuck. We’re all about “less is more.” If there was any way to continue this breakdown without laying out the just sub-gutter-level dipshittery of Arnold’s entire premise here we would take the out gladly. In fact it probably would’ve worked if we had simply screenshotted the title, come up with our own glib headline, and called it a wrap. We’ve done that for plenty of such “articles” before, and our readers, being the smart-ass folks they are, caught on quite easily every time.
Yet operating as though Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen have been, are currently, or realistically ever would be nominated to any government position requiring Senate conformation, much less the United States fucking Secretary of Defense, and using that as your argument that Pete Hegseth is being victimized by the bad faith and hypocrisy of the mainstream media’s attack machine is just…
Well it’s pretty impressive. What’s funny too is that in the timeline in which Kamala Harris won and there’s a much smaller controversy – largely confined to the media world – over Fox and Friends weekend host Pete Hegseth being drunk on the job (and only that, not the rape) then Cooper and Cohen’s New Year’s Eve boozing would actually be an extremely solid counterpoint.
But in this world it’s a harbinger of the reality that Donald Trump is truly back. Now obviously he never actually left the political media world during his four years in exile: Posting insane, hateful shit on his blog and then on Truth Social, the January 6th Select Committee hearings all focused on him, the legal cases, the drag he created for Republicans in the 2022 midterms, his campaign, and finally his return to power in the 2024 election. But the specific reversion right here, as exemplified in the TownHall piece, is the MAGA propaganda-industrial complex’s return to form when we had such astonishingly fucking deranged talking points deployed to defend the fat bastard and his minions.
Yes, maybe the difference is more of context than content. The Biden years had a lot of similarly stupid shit given Trump’s aforementioned refusal to stay and Florida and die. Yet the difference was that, more often than not, they chose the convenient out of turning their attention toward Hunter Biden, critical race theory, “woke Disney,” calling for an investigation into the US Navy to determine if they suppressed radar data indicating that the Titan submersible had imploded so the media would focus on that rather than Hunter Biden something as MAGA Congressman Troy Nehls did in the above June 2023 clip – two weeks after Trump got indicted for stealing classified documents.
Compare that with the Trump years, when right wing media was still chock full of Hillary/Obama conspiracy horseshit well after Clinton had lost the Electoral College: The “uranium” circlejerk, the Clinton Global Foundation “slush fund,” the claims she had actually colluded with Russia so she could lose the 2016 election, “Spygate” which got turned to “Obamagate,” and so on.
The Biden-era obsessions with Hunter and the “Deep State” were a continuation of that very same dynamic, that there was always something to whatabout with, no matter how little most voters in the middle cared, let alone even understood, what the fuck these morons were talking about.
Yet the dispositive differences between right wing propaganda of 2017-2020 and of 2021-2024 speak to the central truth of our politics over the last decade: Republicans are far more comfortable complaining, making shit up, and conjuring bizarre equivocations so fucking stupid they defy imagination while on offense than they are while on defense. The above article trying to put Anderson Cooper’s on-air drinking on the same level as Pete Hegseth’s is itself the same level of quality the machine cranked out no matter who won the prior election – and they’d fit it in as MAGA polemic between inflation this or crime that aimed at drawing in curious low-infos.
Now this shit about doing shots on-air with Andy Cohen is literally the best argument some right wing propagandist has to ensure that a guy who drinks in the morning regularly gets placed in charge of the most powerful fighting force in human history. With that, Sarah Arnold’s piece portends the MAGA Cinematic Universe’s return to the utter fucking ridiculousness they churned out during the first Trump Reich, and a long four years for those of us already tired of this stupid bullshit.