Boy, Major Jack Marshall Sr. would have hated this guy!
Are you caught up? Here:
The Minnesota National Guard confirmed today that Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ newly-minted running mate to the cheers of the woke everywhere, did not retire as a command sergeant major like he has claimed for years, including on his official gubernatorial biography.
The reality is that Walz “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes, but he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s State Public Affairs Officer informed the media.
In 2018, a National Guardsman claimed on social media and in a paid ad that that Walz, then running for governor, declined to deploy to Iraq for combat duty in 2005 and forfeited his title of command sergeant major. But Walz’s biography, published on the state’s official website, says that “Command Sergeant Major Walz” retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005 while he was serving as one of the highest ranking members of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion.
The timeline seems to be that Walz was promoted in September of 2004 in anticipation of his going into battle. When Walz’s battalion was ordered to mobilize for an active duty deployment to Iraq in May of 2005, however, Walz “quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its soldiers without its senior non-commissioned officer, as it prepared to go into battle. Two Command Sergeants Major confirmed this version of events.
J.D. Vance, who fought in Iraq, “pounced,” stating, “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with.”
Indeed, the man who took Waltz’s place when he “bugged out,” Thomas Behrends, now a 63-year-old farmer, was much harsher than Vance, telling the New York Post, “I needed to hit the ground running and take care of the [500] troops — and tell them we were going to war. For a guy in that position, to quit is cowardice.”
Behrends continued, “When your country calls, you are supposed to run into battle — not the other way. He ran away. It’s sad. He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States. That’s not who I would pick to run for vice president.”
Observations:
1. You can guess how the Axis will try to spin this as well as I can, but Walz’s misrepresentation his military record is serious, perhaps the worst revelation about a Veep candidate since the Thomas Eagleton fiasco. If the non-conservative media reports it straight, the Democrats have a big problem entirely of their own making.
2. Did nobody vet this guy? Harris’s first major decision as aspiring President appears to have been careless and incompetent.
3. Without the military service fiasco, Walz’s selection was valuable because it helped indicate what Harris’s values are even as she’s counting on the progressive suck-up news media to hide them. He supported Black Lives Matter and enabled the riots. He has repeatedly advocated socialist policies. He was one of the most autocratic governors in handling the pandemic. He is yet another high-ranking Democratic official who celebrates illegal immigration, and, most important of all, he is the candidate of anti-Semitism and the darling of the pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism voting bloc so near and dear to the Biden administration’s metaphorical heart.
4. Walz also appears to be less than bright. The Harris Campaign reports him saying, “I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt. I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.” Since the facts indicate that Walz never in fact carried a weapon into war, this is just asking to be ridiculed. (Now as for me, I retch every time a Democrat trots out the hoary “common sense legislation” dodge, as it is the mark of a “do something” phony.)
Somehow, I think the fact that Harris’s VP choice has lied about his service record will be a smidge more damaging to the Harris ticket than J.D. Vance’s insult to “cat ladies” seven years ago will be to Trump’s team.
“He said, ‘We shouldn’t allow weapons that I used in war to be on America’s streets.’ Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war? When was this? What was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq, and he has not spent a day in a combat zone?”
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Ethics Alarms 
Stolen Valor is cowardly, evil and just plain disgusting, an insult to every true American soldier. I remember when actor Brian Dennehy was outed, having lied for years about his service in Vietnam, which was all imaginary. Dennehy apologized but I think it affected his career, I for one would nevere watch him in a film again! Walz should be shunned as the liar and coward that he truly is….
I missed the whole Brian Dennehy scandal. Very disappointing: I admired him as an actor and knew his daughter a bit when she was an actress in D.C.
He was demoted because he had committed to two more years of service in order to be qualified for a training academy that he had requested. He then requested retirement before completing the training, very soon after being informed that his unit was being deployed.
The memes are already out there saying that he had 24 years of service and not a single bone spur. Boy does that look stupid now.
I have absolutely no use for pacifists or anti-military jerks. However, I can respect a principled pacifist more than this. I can also respect someone who leaves the military and is open about the reasons more than this. I can’t respect someone who ducks out of the military on the eve of battle and leaves his unit in the lurch obviously because he is afraid to go into battle because he might die there,. Then leaves the military claiming a rank he never held permanently. That’s a pretty good case of stolen valor. Yet this lying and conniving and hiding POS is going to dare to lecture JD Vance, who did actually fight in Iraq?
This was a bad calculation on the laughing hyena’s part. Yes I called her a laughing hyena, because it fits. Governing is serious business, not something to be laughed about and not to be entrusted to someone who laughs constantly like life is all a big joke. She decided that it was more important to try to keep the pro Hamas vote in Minnesota and Michigan and hope that Philadelphia and Pittsburgh would put her over the top in Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro, who I don’t like, but who is a proven moderate and someone able to get things done, was shut out for no reason other then his faith and the fact that he chose not to side with a terrorist group.
Of course the Democrats will deny that there was even a whiff of anti-Semitism here, and the mainstream media will just take them at their word. This is despite the fact that their candidate’s opinion on how to handle the Hamas Israel conflict is that this simply must end and that’s it. If this were the other way around, and a republican would be vice president was found to have deserted his unit on the eve of combat he would be shredded by the mainstream media and called chicken hawk and a lot of other things. They’d probably even be talking about bringing criminal charges against him for claiming a rank he didn’t have. The Democratic party is relying on the mainstream media to bury this and to lie and deny. This is just more proof of the depths to which they will sink to stay in power.
He’s been picked because the DNC for all its open disdain and dismissiveness of Vance is legitimately scared of his appeal to regular Americans.
They’ve already done everything they can to cast Walz as the kind of guy Vance actually is.
They’ve spread photos of him just a guy on the farm. They’re selling camo Harris/Walz hats as if we’re going to suddenly believe they like outdoorsy people. They spread stories of his hunting/fishing/bakcpacking. They’ve casually mentioned that he’s just a rural guy who rose above “his station” to success. He’s a military man!!!!!
It’s all attempts to take Vance’s life and recast it into Walz’s.
The DNC, always disdainful of non-elites and always quietly pushing elitist creditialism are suddenly thinking Vance making it into Yale is a bad mark.
These miscreants are so transparent at this point.
“These miscreants are so transparent at this point.”
So far, apparently not transparent enough for the target audience—you know, morons—to figure out what’s going on.
I would bet more of those dumb camouflage hats were gleefully bought by democrat sheep who have openly said things disdainful about camouflage wearing rednecks than people who haven’t said anything.
And none of them know why they’re buying them other than they’re supposed to.
https://x.com/hemingquay/status/1821169928273052005?s=46&t=hYBRdyKc75ixaD6bBbzJZw
This guy does a really good explanation via 1984’s worst predictions and instead of sounding crazy it makes everything crystal clear.
Immediately believing the lie with all enthusiasm despite the lie being a lie only 5 minutes before is the mark of a fully indoctrinated follower of the Party.
Forcing the opposition into humiliating mass-believed frameworks is part of the indoctrinating strategy.
I saw another guy do a really good explanation that a lot of the woke nonsense very easily parallels the kind of humiliation rituals conquerors put their defeated subjects through to “break” them culturally.
I would love to see that Michael, if you have a link.
That is because the target audience doesn’t care about any of this stuff. They have been told that another four years of Trump will seal the nation’s fate to the Alt-Christian-Racist-Right.
jvb
If our purpose is to be scrupulously honest about the candidates’ military service, then we shouldn’t say he “fought in Iraq”. He did deploy to a theater of war as a marine, but he was a “combat correspondent” (i.e. a military journalist) and did not see combat.
It depends what the meaning of “see” is…
Sorry, that comment was about JD Vance. I thought I’d put that in there but autocorrect tripped me up.
“But Walz’s biography, published on the state’s official website, says that ‘Command Sergeant Major Walz’ retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005 while he was serving as one of the highest ranking members of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion.”
This hasn’t been scrubbed/stealth edited yet? Is Lefty asleep at the wheel…?
PWS
(2) Sure they vetted him. Everyone else was WORSE! Shapiro had to be eliminated because he did his service with the IDF, not the US military. No Muslim would vote for him. Without the Muslim vote-harvesting machine in Minnesota and Michigan, those states could be lost. The other candidates must have had other, even worse , in their closets.
They probably didn’t think this was that bad and it probably isn’t for the Democratic base. I mean, getting college paid for and all the other benefits of National Guard service for 24 years and then bailing when you are actually expected to do the work (combat) for a combat role? How is that any different from getting student loans for a college education and then demanding that someone else pay for them?
(4) Perhaps Tim Walz had to use a weapon to fight off prostitutes or something during his deployment to Italy.
When I was working at McDonald’s, one of the managers was in the National Guard. She told us that she had been notified that her (transportation) unit was being activated to go to Iraq for the first Gulf War. She also told us she wouldn’t have to go because she was 3 months pregnant. Well, she came back from the deployment meeting (4 months later) pretty somber. She said every single woman in the unit was 3 months or less pregnant, all presented papers to that effect, and not one woman in the unit had to go to Iraq. The men were mad, the commander was furious. She was the last woman called and she cringed when she gave her paperwork to the commander. He told her not to leave and to stay behind. She wondered what SHE had done. Well, the commander wanted to apologize to her because she was the only one he WASN’T upset with because it was obvious that she had a ‘preexisting condition’. All the people in that room took the money and benefits of the National Guard. The Guard pays and trains them to serve when they are needed. When they were finally needed, those women (and Tim Walz) walked away from their obligation. My manager told me that she was shocked. She had heard the jokes about all the women in the Guard getting pregnant to avoid deployment, and she thought maybe one or two might do it, but not every single one of them.
What I find disturbing (?) illuminating (?) about this situation is that the truth would have been sufficient to make Walz look patriotic and sympathetic to the military. Retiring as a master sergeant after over two decades of honorable service is not a bad thing. Knowing about military grade weaponry because you trained with it and trained others in its use is not a bad thing. Carrying such weapons as part of your daily routine as a soldier is not a bad thing. There’s no need to say “command sergeant major” or “carried in war.” (The latter may be no more than sloppy phrasing, the kind we hear from politicians of all political stripes on pretty much a daily basis; the former is, must be, an intentional fabrication.)
Walz officially retired in May of 2005, meaning he started the process before that. (One source says January, but it’s not exactly a politically neutral site.) His unit wasn’t put on call until July, and wasn’t deployed until August. Yes, there were rumors before that. But there are always rumors. I’d suggest that his retirement has more to do with his disagreement with the younger Bush’s Iraq policy than with anything like cowardice. He did not, as Vance smarmily alleges, abandon his unit for reasons of personal safety.
So why make up stuff that isn’t true? Because that’s what politicians–every one of them–do. They say whatever they wish would be true about themselves or their opponent, and hope they won’t get busted.
It will be a cold day in hell before I’d vote for J.D Vance for dogcatcher, let alone vice president, but I’ll give him this much credit: he has, to the best of my knowledge, never claimed to have “fought in Iraq.” He served there, briefly, but his job was writing press releases. A charitable reading of Vance’s so-called autobiography would be to call it a work of fiction with an overlay of cultural Darwinism, but on this particular point, he tells the truth. Credit where it’s due, and all that.
“So why make up stuff that isn’t true? Because that’s what politicians–every one of them–do. They say whatever they wish would be true about themselves or their opponent, and hope they won’t get busted.”
Claiming military honors, rank or valor has to be put in a different category, Curmie. That’s why Congress tried to make “Stolen Valor” a crime. Richard Blumenthal got away with it and still was elected Senator, but that was (I hope) mainly because his opponent’s main “qualification” was that she was married to a famous professional wrestling czar.
I don’t think “everybody does it” plays in this scenario.
I don’t excuse the rank business. It strikes me as weird that someone would be promoted in anticipation of doing something, but that’s apparently how it works, and Walz had to have known that he had been demoted. No excuses there.
The allegations of cowardice are pretty flimsy, though. Another case of over-reach where the truth would have been enough.
Agreed. Not cowardice, just pragmatism…like John Wayne accepting a deferment in WWII because he had young children, knowing that to interrupt his rising film career at that point would likely undo all of its progress.
It’s not especially courageous or patriotic either, of course.
Here’s the thing: Walz had to know that the optics of this would not look good objectively, yet he’s added fuel to the potential fire by lying about his rank which was going to attract attention to this situation and make it look worse. If I served in the military and left right before my unit was about to be deployed, I’d make damn sure that I was clear about why I was doing that. If I was leaving because I had to care for a sick family member or because I had a child on the way or even because I’d already planned to leave before the order to deploy came down, I’d make damn sure that was part of the record. I would not say I left because I didn’t agree with the commander-in-chief’s decision to take the country into a war, and I definitely would not say I left because I did not want to go into danger, particularly after years and years of peacetime service. It’s just too easy to say that reasons like this are disguises for cowardice and that someone was happy to accept the benefits of belonging to the National Guard as long as he didn’t have to risk his own neck, but got out as soon as it looked like he actually might have to risk his own neck.
The fact is that every veteran in this country at some time wrote this country a blank check for everything including his own life if called upon. That’s something you can’t really understand if you didn’t actually do it. That goes with an unconditional commitment to carry through when it’s time to go into battle. It also goes with a principle of being a brother to every man you go into battle and everything that goes with it, most notably here not to leave your brothers in danger. Walz deprived his unit of their senior enlisted leader on the eve of battle. The man who replaced him said he fled.
Walz built this house of cards, and now it’s about to fall in on him. He didn’t guard against this and always assumed it wouldn’t be found or that it wouldn’t matter. Well, it does matter. He’d better come up with an explanation, and fast.
From the retired Command Sergeants Major of the Minnesota National Guard: The Truth About Tim Walz
MONEY QUOTE: “WHEN THE NATION CALLED, HE QUIT. HE FAILED to complete the United States Army Sergeants Major Academy. HE FAILED to serve for two years following completion of the academy, which he dropped out of. HE FAILED to serve two years after the conditional promotion to Command Sergeant Major. HE FAILED to fulfill the full six years of the enlistment he signed on September 18th, 2001. HE FAILED his country. HE FAILED his state. HE FAILED the Minnesota Army National Guard, the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion, AND HIS FELLOW SOLDIERS. And HE FAILED to lead by example. SHAMEFUL.”
PWS
Considering that was written/published in November 2018, that is going to be a problem for the DNC.
jvb