Swift-Boating Tim Walz

The Media Research Center fished around for attacks on Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz -- then settled on nitpicking his military service (and complaining the attacks were called out).

Nov 01, 2024

After Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her vice presidential candidate, the Media Research Center went on repeated tirades against people saying nice things about him:

But the MRC was also feverishly constructing ways to attack Walz — presumably working in the background with the Trump campaign. First up was to hype claims that the pick of Walz instead of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was a sop to Islamic Democrats and others who don’t like Jews:

The first major salvo came from Tim Graham in his Aug. 7 column trying to link both Walz and Harris to 2020 rioting that began in Minneapolis with the death of George Floyd:

Kamala Harris announced that her running mate will be Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who drew national huzzahs in the last few weeks for underlining the Democrat message that J.D. Vance is a major-league weirdo.
Vance congratulated Walz for the gig, and lowered the boom: “Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and the few that got caught, Kamala Harris helped bail them out of jail.”
One of many stories omitted by the pro-Kamala media was her June 2020 tweet soliciting donations to something called the Minnesota Freedom Fund: “If you’re able to, chip in now to the #MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
It’s a bit euphemistic to describe rioters as “protesting.” Democrats usually call rioters “insurrectionists” if they love Trump. If they’re racially obsessed leftists, then they deploy affirming terms, like a “rebellion” or a “reckoning.”
In a check of the Nexis database for Harris and the MFF, here’s a few media outlets that have skipped this story for years: ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, The New York Times, and USA Today. NPR offered a few stories hailing the MFF, but none mentioning Harris. The Washington Post “Fact Checker” squad rushed to Kamala’s defense on it.

Graham didn’t explain why accused rioters should have uniquely prohibited from bail like most other criminals are — and he refused to quote from or even link to the Washington Post fact-check in question, which pointed out that Harris never actually donated to the fund despite promoting it, and that judges, not the fund, determines who is eligible for bail. Later in his column, Graham twisted himself in knots trying to redefine words to keep his preferred narrative alive when another fact-check blew it apart:

A new Twitter controversy erupted on July 25, when Minneapolis CBS affiliate WCCO complained, “Trump falsely accuses Harris of donating to Minnesota Freedom Fund, bailing out ‘dangerous criminals’.” WCCO was extremely technical. Trump said at a rally, “one of the dangerous criminals Kamala helped bail out of jail was Shawn Michael Tillman,” who murdered a man after his release.
Like the usual Democrat fact-checkers, WCCO took “helped bail out of jail” to mean “donated,” when it’s quite clear Harris asked for people to “chip in now” to the bail fund. She “helped” the fund.

Graham didn’t explain why it shouldn’t be assumed that the obvious definition of “helped” — donating money — should be excluded.

The same day, Mark Finkelstein raged that Walz sounded too conservative:

Somebody call the FTC: we’ve got a glaring case of false advertising!
The Democrats are now trying to pass themselves off as some sort of neo-libertarians. Kamala Harris kicked off the notion, making “freedom” her campaign slogan,.
And at the rally yesterday announcing her pick of Tim Walz, her new running mate put a cherry on it. Walz claimed:
“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: mind your own damn business!”
On today’s Morning Joe, Jonathan Lemire enthused over Walz’s libertarian line: “That line also going to be a thing. Mind your own damn business.”

As evidence otherwise, Finkelstein quoted a right-wing writer whining that Walz “established a taxpayer-funded phone line in Minnesota so liberal scolds could snitch on their neighbors who refused to wear masks outside.” But when the unsafe choices of some people can affect the health of others, such actions are warranted. He also quoted the right-wing Catholic League complaining that Walz “signed a law that banned “conversion therapy” for transgender youth. These exploited young people want to ‘detransition’ back to their father-determined sex, but Walz wants to take this right away from them.” In fact, conversion therapy is a coercive failure — such coercion would seem to run counter to the “mind your own damn business” motto they purport to honor — and such bans do not prevent anyone from doing what they want.

‘Stolen valor’ attack

After fishing around for ways to attack Walz, the MRC — and the larger right-wing pro-Trump oppo research apparatus it’s is a part of — finally landed on something it thought it could exploit: Walz’s military record! Alex Christy was immediately defensive, whining it was pointed out that the right-wing attacks on Walz echoed the swift-boating campaign against another Democrat:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had not even been VP Kamala Harris’s running mate for 12 hours before MSNBC’s All In host Chris Hayes accused Republicans of “swift boating” him on Tuesday. On Wednesday, CNN’s Jim Acosta and Brianna Keilar followed suit by also turning the clock back to 2004 as they defended Walz from GOP criticism.
Hayes was displeased at anyone arguing Walz has a problematic past while supporting Donald Trump:
Some Republicans are talking about swift boating Walz because he left the National Guard back in 2005 rather than stay and deploy to Iraq though I’m not sure trashing an honorably discharged 24-year Army veteran, the highest ranking enlisted man ever to serve the United States Congress, if I’m not mistaken, later worked on the House Veteran Affairs Committee, I don’t think that helps Donald Trump, whose own former staffers say he called American war veterans suckers and losers.
Hayes also turned into a humorless scold as he went after some conservatives for claiming Minnesota isn’t in the Midwest and might as well be considered Canada, “Republicans are going to find out, I think, that framing a gun-owning Midwest nice guy as a radical far-left commie ends up painting you into some really weird corners. Some conservatives, now in order to keep this whole shtick going, now claiming Minnesota just isn’t real America. No, literally, the secretary of the Ohio Republican Party said ‘Minnesota isn’t even in the Midwest, it’s basically Canada’ which last I checked we have 50 states. National Review writer [Heather Wilhelm] who said Minnesota is ‘Canada lite’ ‘might as well be a different planet.’”

Christy also touted nit-picking from Republican VP candidate J.D. Vance that Walz was “using his military service to justify calls for gun control by referencing weapons ‘I carried in war’ despite having never been to war.”

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Jorge Bonilla dutifully quoted from the oppo-research playbook: “Newly minted Democratic vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz (MN) has a major problem on his hands due to his penchant for embellishing his record of service at the Army National Guard. The networks who so warmly welcomed him into the race are now doing their level best to spin this problem away.” When people on TV pointed out that Walz served honorably for decades, Bonilla ranted: “The ’24 years’ stuff is misdirection and “How Dare You” bait that attempts to deflect from the substance of the accusations against Walz, to wit: that he dropped out of Sergeant Major school, completion of which was a condition of his promotion to Command Sergeant Major of his artillery battalion, upon learning that the unit would deploy to Iraq.”

Bonilla then raged that “Walz KNEW” his unit was going to be deployed to Iraq when he retired. In fact, the right-wing Washington Examiner article he cited as evidence stated only that his unit could be deployed, not that it was a certainty, and he retired two months before the actual deployment. And as others have pointed out, Walz had to file his retirement paperwork five to seven months before his actual retirement in May 2005; the notification of possible deployment came in March 2005.

A couple hours later, Bonilla pedded his faulty narrative again:

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s decision to embellish, exaggerate, and otherwise puff up certain aspects of his military service have rapidly turned into a raging wildfire which the Regime Media are desperately trying to contain and extinguish, lest it also consume the presidential prospects of Vice President Kamala Harris.
There was desperate firefighting across the dial, perhaps none more desperate than MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:
[…]
It increasingly looks like Walz chose his Congressional run over his unit. That, combined with other embellishments, such as his claims of serving in Operation Enduring Freedom, and his wearing of a Special Forces ballcap despite never serving in such a unit, becomes increasingly hard to defend. Good luck with that.

This from an organization that has expressed no issues whatsoever with the embellishments and outright falsehoods made by Donald Trump, instead loudly whining he was fact-checked at all.

Mark Finkelstein served up more nitpicking over whether or not Walz carried a weapon “in war”: “Is it fighting dirty to call out Walz’s inflating his military record by stating that he was ‘in war,’ whereas he was never in a combat zone?” Again, the MRC never held Trump to this level of factual accuracy.

Nicholas Fondacaro stuck to his mandated oppo-reserarch timeline:

Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) lit a fire that had only grown larger after he called out his vice presidential opponent Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) for “stolen valor” after he ditched his Army National Guard artillery unit shortly before they deployed to Iraq in 2005. The morning newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC sprang into action Thursday morning as they openly lied about the sequence of events and what Walz had said on camera.
[…]
None of them did an examination of the timeline of Walz’s retirement. Yes, he filed to run for Congress in February, but his retirement wasn’t until May 17. But nearly two months before that date, Walz’s campaign released a statement (pictured above) addressing questions about a possible deployment the Minnesota National Guard knew was happening. At any point, Walz could have suspended his campaign and called off retirement. He didn’t.

In fact, the statement did not acknowledge the deployment “was happening”; it specifically referred to a “possible partial mobilization.”

These nitpicking attacks continued, heavy on attacks from pro-Trump partisans:

Clry Waters remained sensitive about comparing the coordinated right-wing attack on Walz’s military service to the swift boat attack on Kerry in an Aug. 11 post:

National Public Radio’s Rachel Treisman followed MSNBC and CNN in equating Trump running mate Sen. J.D. Vance’s claim, that Kamala Harris’s running mate Gov. Tim Walz was guilty of “stolen valor,” to the 2004 controversy over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. That group credibly attacked the brief Vietnam War record of Sen. John Kerry when he ran against George W. Bush for president in 2004.
The headline to Treisman’s written report gives the game away: Vance’s attacks on Walz’s service mirror ‘swift boating’ of 2004.”
You may recall how the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were tarred by the press for questioning the Vietnam medals and wartime recollections of Sen. John Kerry.
[…]
The Swift Boat Veterans claimed Kerry lied about his record and wrote a book, Unfit for Command, accusing Kerry of exaggerating injuries, writing false journal entries and filing phony reports of his heroism to secure medals. Most media simply attacked the group or dismissed the findings as “unsubstantiated,” rarely bothering to actually test the claims for veracity, even after the Swift Boat Vets proved Kerry false on his claim of having spent Christmas 1968 on a secret mission in Cambodia.
Treisman did no investigation, simply forwarding old conventional wisdom.

But Waters offered no evidence the Swift Boat Veterans’ claims were actually true — he did no investigation beyond linking to a 2004 piece he wrote for the MRC, which offered no proof the accusations were correct. In fact, they were found at the time to be incomplete and flawed.

And it wouldn’t be the MRC if it wasn’t complaining that things were fact-checked. An Aug. 9 post by Christy complained that “PolitiFact officially gave GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance a ‘mostly false’ rating on Friday for claiming his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, abandoned his National Guard unit prior to its deployment to Iraq. However, PolitiFact omitted some key details from those who served with Walz that could’ve changed the truth-o-meter.” But he cited only “people who served with Walz [who] have come out and criticized his decision” — which appear to be partisan opinion and not based in fact.

Swift-Boating Tim Walz

The Media Research Center fished around for attacks on Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz -- then settled on nitpicking his military service (and complaining the attacks were called out).

‘Stolen valor’ attack

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