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Commentary
Republican attacks on Tim Walz's military service are baseless
You may have read that vice presidential candidate and Marine veteran Sen. JD Vance is attempting to cast doubt on the military service of his Democratic counterpart, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Vance accused Walz of “stolen valor” -- and we would all be forgiven for thinking that we’d entered a time warp and awoken in the midst of another presidential campaign 20 years ago.
Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to former President Trump’s reelection campaign, was the architect of the “Swift Boat” campaign during the 2004 presidential election. That smear effort transmuted Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry’s time in Vietnam as a Naval officer from a perceived asset to an electoral liability by raising a litany of bad faith and inconsistent critiques of Kerry’s military service.
Indeed, since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, Republicans seem to be playing the hits. Even birtherism, the racist line of attack against former President Obama championed by Trump prior to his time in the White House, is making a comeback. Trump has been sharing social media posts from right wing activist Laura Loomer who raised questions about Harris’ birth certificate and her racial identity.
Vance is trying to make hay of a video of Walz discussing gun control in which he says, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” A reasonable person might attribute such a quote to a turn of phrase, but we do not live in reasonable times.
Over the course of a distinguished 25-year career as an artilleryman in the Minnesota National Guard, Walz did not see combat but did deploy to Italy in support of the Global War on Terror. Walz has never claimed to be a combat veteran and submitted his retirement paperwork — for apparently administrative reasons, having not finished coursework required to continue advancing through the Army ranks — prior to his unit being notified of an upcoming deployment to Iraq.
As a veteran who served in a combat zone, I would find it a fantastic feat of cognitive acrobatics to take umbrage to the governor’s words.
The controversy swirled through last week’s news cycle with typically Pravda-esque, party-line coverage coming from the likes of Fox News and more measured headlines from the so-called mainstream media. Meanwhile, many elected veterans and veterans organizations came to Walz’s defense including Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut and Navy pilot who flew combat missions during Operation Desert Storm, and VoteVets, a progressive veterans group.
This imbroglio is overblown. Walz made a somewhat ambiguous comment regarding an issue of public policy that is unrelated to national defense. As a veteran who served in a combat zone, I would find it a fantastic feat of cognitive acrobatics to take umbrage to the governor’s words. And yet, once again, the media validates a trivial argument about offending veterans by treating it as a legitimate controversy: “Vance Attacks Walz’s Military Record, Accusing Him of Avoiding a Tour in Iraq’” read a New York Times headline last week, front-loading the recrimination while making no reference to the flimsy premise on which it was based. It is as though the paper’s headline writers were trying to ape their predecessors from two decades ago who crafted such banalities as “Veterans Group Criticizes Kerry on His Record in Vietnam,” burying the frivolous details like who may be funding said group and whether the critiques had merit.
For years, Republicans have played a shell game, calling out Democrats for perceived violations of patriotic protocol while simultaneously pushing policies that hurt veterans and their families. Take the Honoring our PACT Act, for example. When the U.S. House took up legislation last year to provide benefits to veterans suffering from a variety of chronic respiratory conditions due to exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 80% of Republican members voted against it while every single Democrat supported the measure. I wonder if Vance plans to belatedly upbraid his House colleagues for trying to deny health care to thousands of combat veterans?
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Vance’s silence on Trump’s bonfides when it comes to respecting veterans and military personnel, suggests that he apparently thinks nothing of disparaging gold star families, demanding absentee ballots in Florida not be counted (effectively calling for the disenfranchisement of thousands of military members stationed overseas), railroading the careers of military officers who show insufficient personal loyalty to the former president, showing contempt for prisoners of war, and referring to Americans killed in combat as “losers and suckers.”
Vance’s sycophancy to a Trump, draft dodger who refuses to be in the presence of wounded servicemembers, gives him zero credibility in criticizing Walz, who has spent his entire life in public service of one form or another, and spent his time in Congress on the House Veterans Affairs Committee working across the aisle to improve VA services.
On both style and substance, the party of Trump and Vance has shown nothing but contempt for those who have served, and yet one would hardly know it from looking at the news coverage. Much like the outsized attention paid to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline — while his opponent served up incoherent word salads about electric boats and sharks — the instinct in the media to ensure that coverage appears “balanced” can lead to quite the opposite and, in the case of Walz’s military service, has elevated the frivolous over the substantive.
JD Vance and Republicans are throwing this grenade — as they have many others over the years — because they think very little of the American people. They expect most ordinary citizens to believe that giving a “thank you for your service” to a veteran or standing during the national anthem is all that is required to show love of country, rather than the actual sacrifice and duty required of an individual who serves out a career in the National Guard, juggling family and civilian employment amidst drill weekends and deployments. Vance’s entire argument is predicated on the idea that Walz’s comment was disrespectful to combat veterans. In truth, Walz spent 25 years training and mentoring soldiers on the ground, and then spent his time in Congress fighting for their health care.
Even if one were to ignore Trump’s highly visible episodes of disrespect for service members, Vance’s outrage feels forced and has an online, meme-type quality to it. Much like his party’s concept of patriotism, it is devoid of any depth.
