No choirboy defense breaks containment and is now running in the open field
By 
My friend Steve is all over this one:
It’s a good rhetorical flourish. When your guy has an appalling character record, “we know he’s no choirboy” flips the field. Who wants a choirboy as POTUS or SecDef? Choirboys are 11 years old, guileless, and completely ill-equipped for the rough and tumble world of politics, with their scrubbed faces and pure high voices. They’d get rolled.
It’s very stupid of course, but it’s so effective it even convinces the people making the argument. Pete Hegseth’s drunken infidelities, assaults, and frauds are positives, not negatives.
This of course is just an extension of the argument for Donald Trump as president. Sure he may engage in some “sharp business practices” and display a less than chivalrous frat boy attitude toward women (“frat boy” is right wing code for “serial rapist”), and say a bunch of crazy-sounding stuff that he totally doesn’t really mean about throwing his political opponents in prison, and I wish he wouldn’t tweet so much, but do we really want a choir boy president, when the president has to get “tough” in international negotiations, instead of agreeing to give every illegal immigrant a tastefully renovated mid-century modern ranch as soon as they have an anchor baby, when real Americans can barely afford to visit Cracker Barrel (has there ever been a more aptly named establishment?) more than three times a week?
I really thought the alcoholism would be a bit too much for Trump, who very occasionally has shown a potential glimmer of humanity when mentioning how his older brother drank himself to death, but apparently the idea of having a drunk as Secretary of Defense is more acceptable than giving the libs another win.
Hegseth’s defense of his out of control drinking is that he was just “self-medicating,” to deal with all that PTSD from making seven figures a year as a chat show host on Fox. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a novelist friend of mine when she was on a book tour in New York City (that’s a full working day lad and don’t you forget it), who told me that she only drank to “self-medicate” from the stress of flying to Paris for press interviews etc. I told her I think they actually call that alcoholism.
We laughed and laughed.