Yesterday I wrote about Sec. Hegseth and the disruption at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It's pretty clear if you watch the video of the incident that what led to the warning from the Sentinel at the Tomb was laughter. There was some talking audible for a second but it was a woman's laughter as she walked up the steps that was out of place.
Despite the fact that Hegseth is not a woman and was not the person laughing, the media have worked very hard to spin this as if Hegseth were himself showing disrespect to soldiers at the Tomb. And so you get headlines like this one from Philip Kennicott at the Washington Post: "At the Tomb, Hegseth broke the silence. A sentinel spoke up for the dead."
That headline is strictly true but also entirely misleading. At this point the truth really doesn't seem to matter. This is a story like the one about Trump saying "fine people on both sides" that is so useful to bash him with that the left-leaning media simply can't allow the truth to get in the way.
The Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his entourage were admonished Tuesday for acting disrespectfully, was a response to that trauma...
That’s where Hegseth, his wife and a gaggle of senior staff laughed, joked and bantered as if they were at a garden party, on the 11th day of the 11th month, once known as Armistice Day and now the day set aside to honor America’s veterans. Their boorish behavior, at a place where silence is strictly enjoined, was reprimanded by one of the army sentinels from The Old Guard, who upbraided them with the usual formula: “All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times.”
Did they laugh, joke and banter? This is a stretch. Kennicott writes this as if they were all collectively tittering away, making a mockery of the site. In fact, it was only one person in the party who broke the dignity of the space by laughing loudly and that person wasn't Sec. Hegseth and doesn't appear to have been his wife either. I have yet to see a single article about this which names her, in fact. There's no interest in placing the blame for this loss of decorum anywhere other than on the Secretary.
Eventually, it all comes down to more insults. This reads like the music nerd who has never done a pull-up in his life pounding out angry prose at the school jock.
That Hegseth didn’t care enough on Veterans Day to honor veterans with just a little silence at Arlington should surprise no one. He is a showman who enacts a parody of masculine bravado and bellicosity for an increasingly small audience. Laughing and chatting in front of the tomb was not an isolated lapse of protocol or decorum; it was a display of power, the power of people indifferent to rules, through noise and spectacle, a power so self-conceited it can’t hear the silence that others hold sacred.
Again, the truth doesn't come into it but it should. This was not a display of power. It was a momentary lapse by an aide, something that apparently happens two or three times a day at the Tomb. Hegseth showed respect to the Old Guard by meeting with them and by awarding the person who issued the order to remain quiet with a medal for his service. That does get a very brief mention in the story but it reads like it was added in later by an editor. It's not the story Kennicott is telling here.
Effectively, Kennicott writes opinion columns (though they aren't labeled that way) and nearly all of them are about President Trump in some way. In the past few months he's been focused on screeds about the White House Ballroom, the planned arch, and so on. He is doing his best to turn his opinion of things not yet built into a crime against art or history or both.
The one where he claims the ballroom is about Trump making himself a king by cutting himself off from the people is still my favorite. Apparently, Kennicott just noticed that presidents don't hang out with the common folk very often. This is apparently a new development and also has nothing to do with the multiple assassination attempts on Trump's life.
Kennicott may have once been a good music critic, I don't know. But resistance journalism has twisted him into something very predictable and equally tiresome.
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