Stolen valor is never a good look, but it’s not just politicians who inflate their military records.
Consider Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo, the longtime Mafia boss of Boston. Back in 1983, he’d just been arrested by the FBI after his headquarters in the North End were bugged for months.
Standing in front of a US magistrate at his first court appearance, unshaven after his first night in jail, a desperate Jerry went full Tim Walz in describing his military career.
“I served in the US Navy during World War II,” Angiulo said.
Okay, Jerry. So far, so good.
“And I received four Medals of Honor in the Pacific area!”
Er, not quite. But Jerry was desperate. The former chief boatswain’s mate was trying to get bail. He wanted out of the can. As it turns out, he did get out, but not until 2007, 24 years later. So if you can cut anybody any slack on stolen valor, maybe it would be Jerry Angiulo.
Everybody else, fuhgeddaboutit, as Jerry himself would have said.
And now it turns out that Tim Walz is another… Danang Dick Blumenthal.
Tim Walz is, for now anyway, the Democrats’ candidate for vice president, with Kamala Harris. Until the stories about his military record broke, he was being derided as “Tampon Tim” for his rabid support of putting tampons in middle-school boys’ bathrooms in the name of, you know, equity.
Suddenly, to the Democrats, the prospect of Walz merely being mocked as “Tampon Tim” seems like the good old days.
Harris-Walz is the Democrats’ DEI-DUI ticket, for indeed Walz has also been lugged for driving under — a 0.128! The charge was of course reduced to a reckless driving, of course, because… Democrats.
Walz brags about the “weapons he carried in war,” which sounds very courageous indeed, except for the fact that he was never in a war zone.
Most of all these years he’s been stealing valor, Walz keeps it a little murky. He says he was “deployed in support of” and then throws in “Afghanistan.” There’s all sorts of video out there.
When the Walz story first broke, I decided to do it as a poll question for my radio show. Which is the most embarrassing part of Tim Walz’s lackluster career as a hack woke Democrat?
You have to use shorthand in poll questions obviously, so I wondered if it was fair to say he had a “stolen valor” problem. Yeah, what the hell. I went with it, and I’m glad I did, after J.D. Vance, who was in fact deployed in Iraq as a US Marine, called it “stolen valor garbage.”
Will Walz be forced off the ticket? Somehow I doubt it. Not in the modern Democrat party. And who would they replace him with? Surely not Josh Shapiro, because he is, well, you know.
If you want to know how corrupt the Democrat party and state-run media (but I repeat myself) are, consider how Walz’s 20 years of lies were being defended on cable TV by Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper.
Of course, before he began his career in “journalism,” Todd was a Capitol Hill coatholder for then-Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, who falsely claimed to have been a “combat” pilot in Vietnam.
As for Jake Tapper, he worked for Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law (who was married to another Congressman who stole $10 million in a massive bank fraud). Chelsea’s mom Hillary, you may recall, once claimed that as First Lady in 1996, she landed in Bosnia under “sniper fire.”
Er, no.
Democrats didn’t used to cover up stuff like this, not even ones who were headed for national media. Back in 1982, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan took out his Republican opponent, a Congressman named Bruce Caputo, for lying about being drafted into the Army during Vietnam.
The lie was uncovered by a young aide to Moynihan. His name was Tim Russert.
Forty years ago, Democrat operatives on TV were breaking stories. Now they’ve become fluffers, slobbering over whoever The Party anoints.
Remember John Kerry and his fellow Swift Boat Navy veterans who claimed he was a total phony on his Vietnam service. Everything they said about Kerry was true, but they’ve been excoriated ever since.
So now that Walz is busted, guess what they’re accusing his fellow ex-Minnesota National Guardsmen of?
You guessed it – “swiftboating.”
At least with Kerry, though, his apologists could say that there were what you might ambiguous circumstances. You know, the fog of war. In Walz’ case, there is no fog, because there was no war. At least not for Walz.
And yet he claimed that he was “a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom.” Which meant, Afghanistan. Wasn’t it enough that he was in the service, even if he was stationed in Italy? When Harkin got busted, he just began calling himself a “Vietnam-era veteran.”
Wasn’t it enough for Tampon Tim to say that he was a “War on Terror-era veteran?”
Remember when Danang Dick Blumenthal, the Democrat senator from Connecticut, was busted by, of all places, The New York Times, for falsely claiming that he was not only a Marine veteran of Vietnam, but that he had been spat upon by hippies in San Francisco when he returned to the States.
In the next election, his opponent was Linda McMahon. She called him out on it, and you know what state-run media said she was doing.
Pouncing on the issue. Seizing! Weaponzing!
This scandal could have been averted if the media in Minnesota had ever covered it. The guys in the Minnesota National Guard tried to get it out, when he first ran for governor in 2018. The big newspaper, the Star Tribune, wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole, just like they’ve never done any real digging into Ilhan Omar’s immigration into this country that she despises so much.
If it hurts the Democrats, nothing to see here folks, move along.
If he were still around, I think I know what Jerry Angiulo would be calling Tim Walz – the same thing he called a retired state judge named Poitrast on his 80th birthday:
“A bleepin’ meathead!”
Tim Walz, a bleepin’ lyin’ meathead. The bottom half of the DEI-DUI ticket.