Tim Walz, 1981

Source: Public Domain

To balance out her being a DEI hire, Kamala Harris needed a regular white guy as her running mate. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party doesn’t have any of those, so Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. At the debate this week, the main function Walz served was to remind us that some white men are mediocre.

The media have been doing their level best to convince us that Walz is a salt-of-the-earth, white male, Trump-voting archetype.

This is a man who was so terrified of a virus that is less dangerous than the flu to 70% of the population, that he ordered his entire state locked-down, masked-up and unschooled for a solid year. Walz’s COVID restrictions continued long after even blockheads had figured out that the lockdowns accomplished nothing beyond destroying businesses, lives and children’s developing brains, dragging on through at least three different styles of useless paper face masks.

Hoping to distract from his party’s hatred of working-class white men, Walz incessantly boasts that he’s a “union man,” as if he’s Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.” But he wasn’t a coal miner, a truck driver or steelworker. He was a teacher, meaning he spent up to eight hours a day in a comfortable, temperature-controlled classroom, couldn’t be fired and got summers off.

Walz obviously knows what an unimpressive figure he cuts, otherwise, he wouldn’t be constantly telling petty, image-boosting lies about himself.

He has, for example, come up with a million different ways of implying he served in combat in Afghanistan. In 2004, he held a sign for John Kerry that said, “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry.” Similarly, in 2006, his congressional campaign literature described him as an “Operation Enduring Freedom veteran.”

In fact, he deployed to Italy, 3,000 miles away from any fighting. No big deal. I wasn’t in combat either. Neither were most Americans. Why must Walz lie?

Since being caught in this prevarication, he’s been using the Clintonian “technically true” trick, referring to his time in Italy as a deployment “in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.”

Walz has repeatedly claimed that, seized with patriotic fever the week of the 9/11 attack, he promptly reenlisted in the National Guard. “My 20 years,” he says “was actually, ironically enough, up that week of September 11, 2001, because of the time I had off and made up, so I reenlisted like, I think, the vast majority people did with a real uncertainty but wanting to with a real sense of wanting to do something.”

In response to media inquiries, the Minnesota National Guard recently clarified that he couldn’t have reenlisted that week because he wasn’t eligible for retirement for another year.

Walz has long claimed the title of “retired command sergeant major” — the highest rank possible for enlisted soldiers. After he was busted, his title was revised to “retired sergeant major.”

The Harris campaign put out a video about Walz when he joined the ticket showing him railing against guns, saying: “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”

Obviously, he never carried weapons in a war because he was never in a war.

The lie aside — what kind of badass, battle-hardened combat veteran supports gun control? Will the Democrats’ next macho man be David Hogg? (The demographic categories most likely to support Second Amendment rights are: Men, whites, non-college educated and gun owners — which Walz allegedly is. Of course, he’s also allegedly a man.) Democrats must really be running low on white men. They should try going to an NRA meeting.

Walz told a slew of lies about his 1995 drunk driving arrest (blood alcohol level 0.128) assuring the press that he wasn’t even drunk — in fact, he was allowed to drive himself to jail! — and he only failed the sobriety test because of a misunderstanding due to his hearing loss from service in the Guard. (Never has so little war experience been deployed in so many lies.)

Every one of those claims about his DUI is false.

This week’s whopper was Walz saying he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre, when, in fact, he was home in Nebraska. (But he still spent Christmas of 1968 in Cambodia with John Kerry.)

Asked about this latest tall tale at the debate, he said — actual quote:

“Look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I’m proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms … ” and on and on for several hundred more words.

Moderator: “Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?

“No.”

When it comes to the candidates’ detailed policy positions, I have trouble deciding between Harris’ “I grew up in a middle-class family” and Walz’s “I grew up in a small town.”

Considering that Harris’ entire political career has consisted of being an unqualified token minority, it’s only fitting that her running mate is an unqualified token white guy.