Column: This is what makes JD Vance’s attempt to ‘Swift-boat’ Tim Walz’s military service so pathetic
As soon as I heard Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance smearing the military service of his opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, all I could think was: Seriously? Are we really doing this again?
Are we really going to allow Republicans — who are freaking out now that their presumed glide path back to the White House has become a very bumpy road — to slime Walz the way they slimed Vietnam veteran John Kerry 20 years ago?
“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did?” Vance said last week in Michigan. “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.”
Numerous journalists have called out this lie. They have also reported that the “people he served with” are Republicans rooting for former President Trump.
Expanding a menagerie of tales that out-weird even Donald Trump and JD Vance, the independent presidential candidate said he left a dead bear in Central Park.
Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard before being honorably discharged. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he was stationed in Italy, providing support to American combat troops. In early 2005, months before his unit was ordered to Iraq, he decided to retire from the Guard to run for Congress. He became only the second Democrat in more than a century to capture a traditionally Republican seat and continued to support the military as a member of the House Armed Services and Veterans Affairs committees.
In 2018, when he was running for governor, Walz inaccurately claimed that he carried weapons “in war” in the course of making an argument against allowing civilians to possess assault weapons. Vance disingenuously accused Walz of “stolen valor,” a phrase typically used to describe lying about military service or honors.
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Like Walz, Vance enlisted right out of high school. He served four years in the Marine Corps and was deployed to Iraq for about six months in 2005 and 2006. He worked in public affairs and was never in combat, though that does not mean he was never in danger. No American in Iraq in those days, military or civilian, was totally safe.
To many Americans, the attempted sliming of Walz has a familiar ring.
“Republicans,” Hillary Clinton wrote on social media last week, “are re-running an old tactic and trying to smear a veteran who’s also a Democrat.”
“Swift-boating” worked once before. Why not try it again?
In 2004, then-Sen. Kerry, a bona fide war hero, ran against President George W. Bush. Like many privileged young men looking to avoid combat in Vietnam, Bush had served in the Texas Air National Guard.
Kerry had been a Navy lieutenant. He commanded a Swift boat on the Mekong Delta for four months in 1969, earning a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Devastated by what he had witnessed, Kerry became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War soon after he returned home.
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” he famously asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, nearly two years before the United States pulled out of Vietnam.
His activism earned him the lasting enmity of those who supported the misbegotten war. He was accused of endangering soldiers who were still fighting.
Years later, when Kerry accepted his party’s nomination at the Democratic convention in Boston, he crisply saluted and said, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” This was threatening to Republicans, who settled on a then-novel strategy: They would turn Kerry’s greatest strength into his greatest weakness.
Hence the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and eventually the term “swiftboating.”
The “truth” they promulgated was that Kerry was a fraud who lied about his service. It was such an outlandish and untrue accusation that Kerry tried to ignore it. By the time his campaign realized it was hurting him, the lie had already been lodged in the public imagination.
It should come as no surprise that Republican political operative Chris LaCivita, one of the architects of the disingenuous campaign against Kerry, is now one of two co-managers of Trump’s campaign. His fingerprints are all over Vance’s outlandish claims about Walz.
The great irony is that Trump ducked service in Vietnam partly by claiming bone spurs in his heels.
That didn’t prevent Trump from savaging Republican Sen. John McCain, a Navy pilot who spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and bore the scars of his torture there his entire life.
“I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said during his first presidential campaign.
As president, the Atlantic reported, he repeatedly disparaged service members who died in war — calling them “losers” and “suckers” — and requested that wounded veterans, especially amputees, not be allowed in military parades.
“Nobody wants to see that,” he told staff during a 2018 planning meeting.
Every time Vance attacks Walz’s military service, Democrats should remind voters that it’s in shameless service of a man who utterly disdains Americans who risk their lives to serve their country.
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