SCANDAL! Pete Hegseth Drinks Beer!

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Earlier this week, there were reports that Donald Trump was considering backup candidates to replace Pete Hegseth as his nominee for Secretary of Defense because Hegseth’s nomination was in jeopardy over trumped-up allegations of misconduct. At the moment, Hegseth’s nomination appears to be okay, as more Republican senators have been coming out in support of his nomination.

With their initial smear campaign floundering, the media have predictably shifted gears. And what’s their new line of attack? Brace yourself: Pete Hegseth drinks beer! Yes, that’s the scandal they’ve decided to run with. It’s as absurd as it sounds, but it’s also exactly what we’ve come to expect.

“Allegations of excessive drinking have shadowed Hegseth’s career in the years since as he’s risen from running a veterans nonprofit to becoming a star Fox News host and now President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the Defense Department — a selection that hangs in the balance on the Hill as some senators question his relationship with alcohol,” reports the Washington Post. “At Fox News, Hegseth had a reputation [as] a heavy drinker, according to six former Fox News employees who worked directly with Hegseth and saw him drinking on the job or visibly drunk at work events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.”

Several years ago, during a St. Patrick’s Day segment on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” support staff at the cable news network set up a display of beers for a holiday segment on the show. After the segment aired, Hegseth walked by the display table and drank each beer, according to two former colleagues who witnessed the incident and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive episode. The incident struck the colleagues as jarring for two reasons: One, the displayed drinks had been sitting out for hours and were stale and warm; two, the show wraps up at 10 a.m., an early hour for alcohol consumption.

According to the Washington Post, several Fox News employees, including Will Cain, have refuted claims that Hegseth drank excessively during his time at the network. Notably, no one at Fox has come forward with similar accusations on the record, and the network itself declined to comment.

That didn’t stop the paper from running this absurd hit piece.

[Attorney Tim] Parlatore, asked by The Post to address the St. Patrick’s Day incident, responded: “These claims about alcohol while on the set at Fox & Friends are completely false. And the sheer number of Fox News employees who have come out over the past 24 hours on the record with their names to debunk these claims vastly outweighs the unverifiable anonymous claims that have been reported. So there’s absolutely nothing to that.”

Does this playbook sound familiar to anyone? Is anyone else experiencing déjà vu from the Kavanaugh hearings when the left employed the exact same strategy to thwart his nomination? We all knew that Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh were bogus. Her details were contradictory; she had no witnesses to corroborate her story, and Kavanaugh had evidence that he wasn’t even at the party where she claimed to have been assaulted. While there’s little reason to relitigate that craziness, it’s easy to forget that Democrats were so desperate to stop Kavanaugh’s nomination that they were literally asking him about teenage drinking games during his confirmation hearings.

It is clear that the left realizes it’s losing the effort to stop Hegseth’s confirmation, and it has dusted off its Kavanaugh playbook and repeating it step by step.