During a wild broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, December 4, MSNBC personality and “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski had to apologize live on air for comments that a guest had made in an earlier segment of the show. That awful guest who caused the incident was The Atlantic’s David Frum, who mocked Fox News and Pete Hegseth.
As background, Pete Hegseth is an Ivy League-educated, decorated combat veteran who Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Defense in his second term. Best known for his time as a Fox News Channel host, Hegseth has been much maligned in the media over an alleged drinking problem that Trump has said isn’t a concern, and for alleged issues with women his mother says were misrepresented.
Frum, a notorious Trump hater, went after Hegseth during the December 4 broadcast of Morning Joe by repeated the allegations regarding his drinking and using a story to emphasize his point. Beginning his commentary on the so-far unproved allegations that, in any case, stem mostly from some time in the past, Frum said, “Well, just given what one sees on camera, if you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”
Continuing, Frum began his story and managed to work in extra smears of Hegseth, saying, “In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee.”
Building on that, Frum repeated the other unproven allegations about Hegseth via the story he was sharing, saying, “It emerged that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too much, he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989.”
He added, not admitting that the stories and smears are unproven, “You don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the sex-posting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the 21st century.”
His comments were so awful that, later in the show, Brzezinski had to apologize for them. Doing so, she said, “And before we go to break or a little bit earlier in this block, there was a comment made about Fox News in our coverage about Pete and the growing number of allegations about his behavior over the years and possible addiction to alcohol or issues with alcohol.”
She continued, “The comment was a little too flippant for this moment that we’re in. We just want to make that comment as well. We want to make that clear. We have differences in coverage with Fox News, and that’s a good debate that we should have often. But right now, I just want to say there’s a lot of good people that work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we want to leave it at that.”
Watch her here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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