Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was either hungover or halfway in the bag this morning during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, because he contradicted himself several times over the course of just a few minutes, leaving one congressman to shut him down as he rambled on aimlessly about the U.S. military conflict with Iran.
“You have to stare down this kind of enemy who is hell-bent on getting a nuclear weapon and get them to a point where they’re at the table, giving it up in a way that they haven’t have,” Hegseth said, as if lecturing the committee members.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking member of the committee, interjected.
“So they haven’t broken yet? Okay, we haven’t gotten there yet.”
“Well, their nuclear facilities have been obliterated underground,” Hegseth asserted. “They are buried—”
Smith: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”
“Reclaiming my time for a second here,” Smith added. “We had to start this war, you just said 60 days ago, because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat. Now you’re saying that it was completely obliterated?”
“They had not given up their nuclear ambitions, and they had a conventional shield of thousands of —,” Hegseth replied.
“So Operation Midnight Hammer was a moment of nothing of substance. It left us in exactly the same place we were in before,” Smith interjected.
The Trump administration has spent over $25 billion on the Iran fiasco, and yet we are no closer to containing the Iranians than we were before. Or, if you believe Hegseth, we eliminated a threat that is still a threat because he wants us to believe he didn’t just contradict himself and look like a fool.
Remember when Donald Trump bragged that he only hires “the best people”? Clearly, Whiskey Pete is not one of the best.
