Tim Walz is cooked.
When you make being a military man and everything that implies—honour, discipline, bravery, self-sacrifice, love of country—a central part of who you are and your case for leadership at the highest levels of national life, you can’t really survive having your former battalion commander say you’re a sneaky self-serving little coward—not really. Chain of command takes precedence, and all that. And certainly in America, where the military, despite years of ill-meaning political assaults, remains a hugely respected institution and object of national pride.
Here’s what Tim Walz’s battalion commander, retired Lt. Col. John Kolb, had to say about the Minnesota Governor.
“I do not regret that Tim Walz retired early from the Minnesota Army National Guard, did not complete the Sergeants Major Academy, broke his enlistment contract or did not successfully complete any assignment as a Sergeant Major. Unwittingly, he got out of the way for better leadership”
Ouch.
But it gets worse.
“Thomas Behrends [Walz’s replacement] was the right leader at the right time. He sacrificed to answer the call, leaving his family, business and farming-partner brother to train, lead and care for soldiers. He earned the privilege of being called Command Sergeant Major. Like a great leader he ran toward and not away from the guns.”
Much worse:
“I have no opinion of Mr. Walz’s decision to leave service at the time he did,” Kolb continued. “It was his right to retire early. I also have no criticism of his service as an E7 and E8 in the MNARNG. By all accounts and on the record, he was a competent Chief of Firing Battery/Gunnery Sergeant and First Sergeant. I cannot say the same of his service sitting, frocked, in the CSM chair. He did not earn the rank or successfully complete any assignment as an E9. It is an affront to the Noncommissioned Officer Corps that he continues to glom onto the title. I can sit in the cockpit of an airplane, it does not make me a pilot. Similarly, when the demands of service and leadership at the highest level got real, he chose another path. #notmyCSM.”
… [That means I’m speechless, by the way.]
Kolb was referring, in particular, to Walz’s decision to retire from the Guard on the eve of his battalion’s deployment to Iraq, but be in no doubt: this isn’t about one egregious incident. This is about Tim Walz the soldier. Tim Walz the leader. Tim Walz the man.
Less than a week after Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate, his reputation lies in tatters. His elaborate construction of misrepresentations—and outright lies—about his 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard, built up over decades, has come crashing down. Blown to smithereens like an Afghan goatherd’s outhouse. Veterans, people who really knew, had been chipping away for decades, but it was only in the last week, when Walz emerged on the national stage as the next potential vice president, that the fragility of the structure finally became clear and the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.
Karl Marx famously said that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. Well, I think we’ve skipped the tragedy and gone straight to farce. Let’s call this what it is. This is Swift Boat II: Electric Boogaloo.
The embarrassing sequel that goes straight to video. The one with a 100% negative score on Rotten Tomatoes.
“The Swift Boat playbook,” as it came to be known, was controversial when it was applied to John Kerry, who actually served in a real warzone—Vietnam—unlike Tim Walz. It’s still up for debate whether Kerry was guilty of any of the things he was accused of, but it’s clear that the damage to his reputation, deserved or otherwise, was a crucial factor in him losing the 2004 election to George W. Bush.
In the case of Tim Walz, by contrast, it seems the criticisms really are justified. We have footage of him misleading—at best—the family of a Gold Star veteran during a congressional hearing, in 2008. Walz insinuated that he had personally suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after being deployed as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. But the truth was, Walz never went anywhere near Afghanistan—and only military personnel who actually went to Afghanistan or the skies above it were part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Tim Walz went to Italy, in a support role. Maybe he had a bad experiencing eating spaghetti with a spoon, but it’s hard to imagine how PTSD could have resulted from being thousands of miles from the warzone in question.
We have footage, too, of Walz telling an out-and-out lie about how he “stood one night in dark of night on tarmac at Bagram Air Base in Iraq and watched a military ramp ceremony,” by which he means the loading of a soldier’s body onto a plane for repatriation. Two problems. Bagram Air Base is in Afghanistan, and we know that Walz never deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq.
Walz told that absolute stinker of a lie, so aromatic I can smell it here, on the other side of the Pond, just three years ago, at a 9/11 anniversary speech at the Minnesota State Capitol.
Has the man no shame?
This is as blatantly false as Hillary Clinton saying she touched down in Bosnia “under sniper fire.”
That silly claim, refuted with ease, didn’t destroy Hillary Clinton’s reputation—after all, what’s one more lie when you’re a Clinton?—but Hillary Clinton wasn’t actually in the military. It’s kind of understandable that a civilian might embroider their experience of arriving in a warzone, but saying you went somewhere you never did as a military man and witnessed a solemn ceremony you never witnessed—well, that’s unforgivable.
Critics, including other veterans like Trump’s running mate JD Vance have called it “stolen valor.” It is.
The mainstream media will try to avoid covering this as much as possible, as is their way. They’ll either pretend it didn’t happen or try to minimise it by roping in rent-a-gobs like Jesse Ventura to obfuscate and say that it doesn’t matter, because the US shouldn’t have been in Iraq anyway—where were those WMDs, George Bush?—so dodging a deployment as part of an illegal war doesn’t count as dereliction of duty, and did I tell you that Trump stole his entire political campaign from my governorship [I’m not bitter]…
But like I said at the beginning, I don’t think this is going to work, at least not if the Trump campaign keeps hammering it, which they should. Just keep saying it: Walz is a fraud and a liar and a man who has dishonoured his country. And there are plenty of other bad things you can say about Tampon Tim besides.
The real question, though, is this: Why are we spending so much time talking about the vice-presidential candidates?
Do you remember a presidential campaign where so much of the focus was on the VP picks and not the people who picked them?
If I didn’t know better, I’d say it seems like a deliberate ploy to draw attention away from the abysmal presidential candidate the Democrats are fielding. From the fact that Kamala Harris is incapable of speaking in public, that she has a terrible record and no policies, and that, until three weeks ago, nobody liked her at all. Those are all things you’d probably want to hide.
Tim Walz’s difficulties with the truth are a distraction plain and simple, as much as all the JD Vance “weird” talk is.
So let’s hope Tim disappears quickly, back to Minnesota, and then we can return to talking about what—and who—really matter in this presidential race.