Hegseth’s nepotism is another interesting example. Or that episode when he was drunk, standing on top of a table chanting “kill all Arabs”.

The list goes on and on. There was no single nomination that didn’t have a lot of reasons not to go through, but they went anyway.

In my view, the lying, demonization, and dismissal of importance were pretty typical for a government scandal. They all play out that way, as the guilty parties try for damage control.

The initial occurrence was spectacularly incompetent in a way that seems to me to be worse than normal.