The heat, as the late singer Glenn Frey would have put it, is on, and the Harris-Walz campaign is feeling it. Now, after several days of being hammered on Minnesota Governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s heavily embellishing his military record, the campaign is responding – by quietly amending Walz’s campaign bio:
Sorry, but that’s too little, too late.
Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign updated its online biography of running mate Tim Walz’s military service amid Republican efforts to question his record in the Army National Guard.
On its website, the Harris campaign axed a reference to Walz as a “retired command sergeant major” and now says that he once served at the command sergeant major rank — a small change that nonetheless reflects his true rank at retirement from the Army National Guard. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, served for 24 years in the National Guard before retiring in 2005 from the military to run for the U.S. House, where he became the most senior enlisted soldier to serve in Congress.
That’s not the part that many of us veterans, combat and non-combat alike, objected to the most.
See Related: Even CNN Torches Tim Walz in Blistering Fact Check About Carrying Weapon ‘In War’
Tim Walz’s Campaign Claimed He Was Going to Iraq Even As He Was in the Process of Deserting His Men
The edits are, to put it bluntly, weaksauce, in that they gloss over only one part of the objections veterans have to Walz’s claims.
In the original biography, the same sentence called Walz “the son of an Army veteran and a retired Command Sergeant Major in the Army National Guard himself,” website archives show. A Harris campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Walz’s gubernatorial office in Minnesota, the website for which still describes him as “Command Sergeant Major Walz.” Walz’s campaign website for governor also used this title.
There is no mention of Walz’s claims about carrying “weapons of war in war”:
Gov. @Tim_Walz: 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,… pic.twitter.com/3IVaXi2RP2
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 6, 2024
As you can see, that X post, from the Harris-Walz campaign, is still up. He never carried these “weapons of war” in war. He was never anywhere near a war. He never deployed to a designated combat zone. Gov. Walz is lying.
But here’s the real kicker: The lie that started Walz’s political career, when he was confronted at a protest of an appearance by then-President George W. Bush:
His challenge prompted a KGB-style interrogation that was sadly characteristic of Bush campaign events. Do you support the president? Walz refused to answer. Do you oppose the president? Walz replied that it was no one’s business but his own. (He later learned that his wife was informed that the Secret Service might arrest him.) Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who’d just returned from fighting the war on terrorism.
Did you get that? Walz – who has never in his life been on the same continent as a war zone – described himself as a “command sergeant major who’d just returned from fighting the war on terrorism.” Everything in that statement is a lie. Tim Walz is a liar. His political career began with a lie, and he’s been lying ever since – and if he ever ends up as Vice President of the United States, he will continue right on lying.
Fortunately, America’s veterans and others will most certainly continue bringing the heat to the Harris-Walz campaign over Walz’s lies:
Wow – Harris campaign doesn’t understand that by continuing to lie that Walz had a higher rank than he actually had, it makes it look MUCH WORSE that he abandoned his men right before an arduous combat deployment.
If he had been lower level, it would not be such a sharp…
— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) August 8, 2024
The post reads:
Wow – Harris campaign doesn’t understand that by continuing to lie that Walz had a higher rank than he actually had, it makes it look MUCH WORSE that he abandoned his men right before an arduous combat deployment.
If he had been lower level, it would not be such a sharp betrayal. But by elevating him as their boss, their COMMANDING SARGEANT MAJOR, they are actually making his ducking more humiliating!
