‘One of the worst Americans’: Chuck Todd’s Pete Hegseth rant goes completely off the rails

BS BULLETIN:

Chuck Todd unloaded on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the Iran war.
He called Hegseth “one of the worst Americans in leadership” and accused him of abandoning his previous anti-war views.
Todd asked: “How does this guy sleep at night?”

Former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd has some thoughts about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

And apparently none of them are: “Gee, I wonder how Pete’s doing?”

Todd unloaded on Hegseth during his latest podcast while discussing the Trump administration’s war with Iran, accusing the Defense secretary of abandoning the anti-interventionist rhetoric he embraced before joining the administration.

Then Todd reached for the subtlety. “Pete Hegseth is one of the worst Americans in leadership right now,” Todd declared.

Not one of the worst defense secretaries. Not misguided. Not incompetent. One of the worst Americans in leadership.

And Todd wasn’t finished.

“He’s somebody who was a gigantic critic of endless wars,” Todd said, arguing that Hegseth previously built his public persona around skepticism of prolonged American military engagements.

“How does this guy sleep at night?” Todd asked.

Todd accused Hegseth of having “no moral compass whatsoever” and argued that the secretary had transformed from someone warning about endless wars into one of the officials carrying out a new American military campaign.

“This guy has become everything he supposedly stood against,” Todd said. That is the heart of Todd’s criticism.

Hegseth did indeed present himself before entering government as deeply skeptical of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment and America’s post-9/11 record of seemingly endless military engagements.

But Hegseth and the Trump administration argue Iran isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan.

They maintain that the United States entered the conflict to destroy an immediate threat from the Iranian regime rather than to occupy the country, rebuild its government or launch another decades-long nation-building exercise.

Hegseth has repeatedly made that distinction. “This is not an endless war,” he has said while defending the operation.

Trump has likewise insisted he doesn’t want American troops occupying Iran and has described the objective as eliminating the regime’s military and nuclear threat rather than creating another Iraq-style American project.

Todd isn’t convinced. And his criticism went beyond Hegseth’s foreign policy. He argued that Hegseth had been elevated into a position for which he was unqualified and suggested the former Fox News host was more interested in maintaining Trump’s approval than adhering to his previous beliefs.

Chuck Todd spent decades working inside NBC News and interviewing some of the most powerful people in Washington. Pete Hegseth is one of the worst Americans in leadership he’s encountered?

Not merely wrong about Iran. One of the worst. That’s some pretty exclusive real estate.

Todd’s rhetorical escalation also comes as the former NBC anchor has become increasingly willing to criticize figures across the political spectrum since leaving the network.

He’s taken shots at Joe Biden’s White House and the media’s handling of Biden’s age, while also becoming a relentless critic of Trump and members of his administration.

Hegseth is an especially inviting target because the Iran conflict puts the Defense secretary directly against one of the political currents that helped propel Trump back into office.

A substantial portion of the MAGA coalition is deeply suspicious of foreign intervention.

Some prominent Trump supporters have openly worried that Iran could become exactly the kind of open-ended conflict Trump campaigned against.

That’s the serious debate Todd could have had.

Has the administration defined a realistic endgame?

How long will American military operations continue?

What constitutes victory?

How much will it cost?

Those are legitimate questions.

Instead we got: ONE OF THE WORST AMERICANS IN LEADERSHIP.

Because apparently the volume knob on political commentary only has two settings now.

Mute.

And DEFCON 1.