Last night, Pete Hegseth was confirmed to be the next Secretary of Defense.  With three Republican Senators voting against him – two of them hailing from states that elected President Trump by overwhelming margins – this is the first confirmation process in several years that required the Vice President’s tiebreaker vote.

As the confirmation process became more and more heated, and as Hegseth’s opponents mined and unleashed their ammunition against him, many Republicans second-guessed the wisdom of spending so much time, energy, and political capital on a protracted fight for such an unconventional nominee.  What was it about Hegseth in particular that brought out the Kavanaugh playbook against him, and what was it about him that made Trump decide to stick by him?

Why Hegseth?

Throughout this process, we were told that Hegseth had too much “baggage.”  But that implied that the others before him or those in comparable positions to his didn’t have baggage.  In reality, they all did, but it was a different kind of baggage.  What else, for example, would you call a group of neocons and surveillance hawks who coordinate espionage campaigns against American citizens and leaders, and then repeatedly lie about it with impunity?  “Baggage” is a apt word even if it is also a mild one.

Former CIA Director John Brennan lied repeatedly under oath to Congress.  When he was asked about the fact that his own CIA hacked the Senate office buildings to find out what staffers knew about torture techniques, he denied it, denied knowing anything about it, and when caught was forced to apologize.  He similarly lied about having no knowledge of the Steele Dossier & Fusion GPS – which were the pretext of the “Russian collusion” investigation that turned up with nothing.  He also lied about not knowing that the FBI fabricated evidence to obtain FISA warrants.  Not only did he know about all of it – he was one of the strongest advocates for using all of them.

James Comey lied to Trump about investigating him, and lied about the exoneration statement he all but certainly drafted about Hillary Clinton before he even interviewed her about the destroyed server.  Comey lied to the FISA Court to obtain surveillance warrants against Carter Page, and when he was asked about every FBI operation from 2016-18, he told Congress something 200 times, “I don’t know,” “I can’t recall,” “I don’t remember,” etc., as though he was absent the whole time.

Comey’s successor Andrew McCabe lied about the leaks from the FBI and then even admitted that he lied to investigators about much the same as above.

As a national security advisor to Obama, Susan Rice lied about Benghazi, the terrorist exchange to get Bowe Bergdahl, chemical weapons in Syria, and her own role in doxxing American citizens that were under Obama’s surveillance.

And the former director of National Intelligence James Clapper not only lied about the data collection efforts against American citizens, but gave perhaps the most galling explanation anyone could ever give when he said that he gave the “least untruthful” answer.

All of these lies happened within the last 10-15 years.  Most of these cretins, if they needed a confirmation vote in the first place, were confirmed overwhelmingly.  And some of them (and many others) make up the now notorious list of the 51 intelligence officers who lied about the Hunter Biden laptop having “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation,” which led to censorship of the New York Post and its bombshell story about the crime styles of the Biden family, and an intense pressure campaign to ensure social media compliance with such censorship efforts on behalf of the Biden 2020 campaign.

“Baggage” can also be a simple picture of incompetence.  Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin went AWOL for a week, checking himself into Walter Reed for a voluntary surgery, and didn’t tell his deputy secretary or anyone else where he was or what he was doing.  And he did that when the Red Sea Houthi Crisis was at its zenith.

So sure – Pete Hegseth has a drinking and an adultery problem, and he’s got tattoos that scare people.  But the reason he was chosen is because of the excesses and abuses of his predecessors and of their contemporaries as described above.  He was chosen because of the incestuous bureaucracy that blunts the military’s outward edge and freshly cleans the lenses of the internal surveillance cameras that keep watchful eyes on anyone who might stifle the flow of careerist circulation of military officers and their next jobs with defense contractors and/or the media, or who might disrupt sweetheart deals within the defense industrial complex.

Trump wanted a populist warrior who understood the everyman soldier in ways most high-ranking generals don’t.  He wanted a swamp drainer who understands lethality as the military’s first and foremost principle, and who believes in a radical model of reform like he does given the coordinated efforts against him during his first presidency, and given that the military finds itself at historically low levels of recruitment, and is in its worst state of readiness in 45 years.  Whether Hegseth will accomplish that mission and live up to the image of what Trump had in his mind is anyone’s guess.  But that was why he was chosen.  That was why he was opposed.  That was why he fought back, and that was also why he was worth confirming.

Why Hegseth?  That’s why. God speed, Mr. Secretary.

– Vivek