During Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appearances on Capitol Hill last week, he repeatedly leaned on a lazy rhetorical strategy. Confronted with tough questions, the beleaguered Pentagon chief tried to defend himself by changing the subject to the recent past.
When Hegseth was pressed, for example, to defend his record of mass firings at the Defense Department, he had an answer he appeared to have prepared in advance. “Under Barack Obama, 197 general officers were removed,” he said in sworn testimony. “So this is not something specific to this administration.”
The problem, however, is that the secretary’s defense wasn’t true, and as The New York Times reported, “The number Mr. Hegseth gave has no basis in fact.”
Making matters worse, this was not the only instance in which the former Fox News host relied on false claims about recent Democratic administrations.
The defense secretary was also asked whether he would be willing to deploy U.S. troops to local voting precincts ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Instead of answering the question directly, Hegseth again looked backward, in keeping with his borderline-creepy fixation on Joe Biden.
“I will note that in 2024, troops were — that was Joe Biden, by the way, Joe Biden — were deployed to polling locations in 15 states,” Hegseth said in sworn testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. For good measure, he repeated, “2024 — Joe Biden — troops deployed to polling locations in 15 states. Explain that one to me.”...
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