Guest’s Anti-Hegseth Rant Is So Far Over The Line Even ‘Morn­ing Joe’ Hosts Con­demn It

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MSNBC guest — and staff writer at The Atlantic — David Frum stepped far enough over the line on Wednes­day that even the hosts of “Morn­ing Joe” balked, con­demn­ing his com­ments as “too flip­pant” for the cur­rent cli­mate.

Frum com­pared Hegseth to a nom­i­nee put for­ward years ago by the late Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush, argu­ing that Hegseth had all of the same weak­ness­es, but none of the strengths. Hosts Joe Scar­bor­ough and Mika Brzezin­s­ki did not inter­rupt Frum while he was speak­ing, but paused after his seg­ment end­ed to address the audi­ence and put some dis­tance on what he had said.

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“Well, just giv­en what one sees on cam­era, if you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed. So, that’s alarm­ing,” Frum said. “In 1989, Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush nom­i­nat­ed John Tow­er, sen­a­tor from Texas, for Sec­re­tary of Defense. And Tow­er was a very con­sid­er­able per­son, a real defense intel­lec­tu­al, some­one who deeply under­stood defense, unlike the cur­rent nom­i­nee. And 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. You don’t wan­na think that our moral stan­dards have declined so much that you can say, ‘Let’s take all the drink­ing, all the sex-pest­ing, sub­tract any knowl­edge of defense, sub­tract any lead­er­ship. And there’s your next Sec­re­tary of Defense for the 21st cen­tu­ry,’” he added.

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But his com­ments, accord­ing to Scar­bor­ough and Brzezin­s­ki, were not accept­able — and they addressed that just before cut­ting away to a com­mer­cial break.

“Before we go to break, a lit­tle ear­li­er in this block, there was a com­ment made about Fox News in our cov­er­age about Pete Hegseth and the grow­ing num­ber of alle­ga­tions about his behav­ior over the years and pos­si­ble addic­tion to alco­hol or issues with alco­hol,” Brzezin­s­ki said. “The com­ment was a lit­tle too flip­pant for this moment that we are in. We just wan­na make that com­ment as well. We wan­na 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 wan­na say to say there are a lot of good peo­ple who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth and we’ll wan­na leave it at that.”