“Daily Show” correspondent Desi Lydic on Tuesday reminded viewers of disturbing comments Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made years before he became embroiled in a scandal over a pair of deadly military strikes on an alleged drug trafficking boat.
Hegseth has been accused of overseeing an act of “murder” or “war crime” in a Sept. 2 attack on survivors who clung to the boat’s wreckage. Lydic said she wished for a sign that he would have been “so cavalier” about war crimes.
That’s when she tossed to a 2019 clip of the former Fox News host defending Mathew L. Golsteyn, an Army major charged with killing an Afghan detainee who was alleged to be a Taliban bomb maker, and pardoned by President Donald Trump before the investigation was completed.
“If he committed premeditated murder, then Duncan did as well. Then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?” Hegseth asked during a “Fox & Friends” interview with then-Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), an Iraq War veteran. “Put us all in jail!”
Lydic shrugged her shoulders as the “Daily Show” crowd applauded.
“Hey! You said it, not me,” she quipped.
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Lydic also mocked the “secretary of defensiveness” for responding to the scandal’s backlash with a “Franklin the Turtle” meme that showed the beloved titular character riding a helicopter and apparently firing missiles at drug boats.
“This whole image is deeply disturbing, especially the part where the turtle is wearing a helmet. Why does he need a helmet? His whole body is a helmet!” she joked.
She then dissed Hegseth for using Franklin in such a manner.
“There’s already several turtles who famously kill people for a living, use them!” said Lydic in a nod to the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
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