I’ll leave to others like Mackubin Owens to sort out the exact timelines and nature of military loyalty and duty surrounding Gov. Walz’s national guard record, but let’s notice one particular aspect of his conduct that is yet another large dot to be connected in the puzzle of the progressive mind.
In a book published last year by the Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum, Minnesota in the Global War on Terrorism, Post-9/11 Profiles, remarks Gov. Walz made on September 11, 2021 are included on page 374. Here’s a key paragraph:
I had the privilege of serving in this state’s national guard. I stood one night in the dark of night on the tarmac at Bagram Air Base in Iraq and watched a military ramp ceremony–a soldier’s body being loaded onto a plane to be returned home. And if you’ve seen it, you don’t leave the same. It makes you wonder, what are we doing? What are we trying to get to? And then watching as all of you have been, the confusing last few weeks with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]
First, Bagram Air Base was in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Second, did Walz ever visit either Iraq or Afghanistan? If he did, it wasn’t on an official guard deployment—that much has been nailed down. It is exceedingly unlikely that he was ever present for a military ramp ceremony of a fallen soldier in either nation. He made this up out of whole cloth. Full stop. (Stay tuned: He’ll claim again that he “misspoke,” and was present when a plane from Bagram landed in Minnesota, if he hasn’t claimed this already.)
But this fits a familiar pattern among leftist politicians (and media figures—recall NBC’s Brian Williams telling tall takes of being under fire in a helicopter in Iraq when it was easily established that no such event happened). Hillary Clinton was “under fire” on the tarmac in Bosnia, was named for the Mt. Everest climber who didn’t make his ascent until after she was born, etc. Bill Clinton has “vivid” recollections of black churches set afire in his Arkansas youth, though historical records contradict this claim. Al Gore “took the lead” in inventing the internet, along with other tall tales. Biden takes the cake, having been arrested with Nelson Mandela along other complete fantasies going back decades (you might even call them “lies,” such as graduating at the top of his law school class when in fact he ranked at the bottom), including the recent claim that his “cancer moon shot” had cured cancer, but in his senility I guess we can pass over this one.
What is it that compels so many leftist politicians to make up heroic stuff like this? Why are progressives in particular so extraordinarily needy? It might just be the insecurity latent in many politicians, but I think there is a subtle or unconscious ideological explanation: when a progressive take as a premise that there is a “side of History” going in a progressive direction, then why do we need progressive politicians? The progressive worldview implicitly—and often explicitly—denigrates human agency: hence the progressive obsession with victim classes and “structures” of oppression. Progressive politicians view themselves as heroes to speed up the inexorable march of the “side of History” (just go back and take in Woodrow Wilson’s revealing profession of exactly this disposition in his essay “Leaders of Men“), but this instantiates a deep psychological need to impute some personal heroism to their own stories that are otherwise lacking. Spending another billion dollars reaches a point of diminishing personal satisfaction pretty fast.
Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. The corollary for leftist politicians like Biden and Walz is that leftists quickly run out of real heroism of their own.
UPDATE: The Harris-Walz campaign has responded with notice that Walz visited Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as part of a congressional delegation in 2008. But read his statement above again: he clearly wants to leave the impression he was there in uniform.
Here’s what Walz said at the time to the Star-Tribune:
“The problem is lost medical records,” said Walz during a call to reporters. When soldiers return with mental health problems, there is often no record of them having problems along the way, he said.
Walz said the transition from military care to the VA system is getting better but needs improvement. Rather than requiring soldiers to prove they were injured defending the country, he said, the documentation needs to be in a centralized system so they get care.
The delegation followed wounded soldiers as they moved from the battlefields to field hospitals to major military medical facilities. During the nine-day trip Walz visited Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Germany.
“I learned that there is no doubt the care our soldiers are receiving is second to none in the history of warfare,” said Walz. “We need some more oversight in terms of the electronic medical records.”
Reads quite a bit different than his 2021 statement. Nothing about standing on the tarmac for a military ramp ceremony.
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