On Tuesday, Kos prominently featured this story about Tim Walz and other veterans running as Democrats in the upcoming mid-term elections.
My goal is to extend the ‘life’ of it as much as possible because Walz’s experience epitomizes the ugliness, the hypocrisy, the strong arm tactics and the arrogance that is the Bush Administration.
In fact, it also exemplifies the life of George Bush prior to his assuming the presidency.
For those of you groaning at an accusation of such wide sweep, simply connect the dots. It’s all there. A lifetime of excess, bluster, contempt, a public-private disconnect, utilizing power, money and intimidation to re-write or delete the nasty from the ‘resume’–it simply and expectedly has continued into the presidency..
Sadly, this is all due to fear. We have elected one of the most cowardly and insecure of individuals to the most powerful office in the world. One who will brook no dissent, no challenge. Never has, never will. George Bush’s lifetime struggle with fear and inadequacy continues to this day.
Basically, Tim Walz was ordered by his Commander In Chief to go to Iraq and put his life on the line so that Iraq could become a so-called free and democratic country.
In return, he was deemed untrustworthy and told to shut up and stay quiet.
That’s the Bush mojo. Always has, always will be.
Them’s some values.
The Atlantic Monthly | January/February 2006
Company, Left
There’s something different about the latest crop of military veterans running for Congress
by Joshua Green
Command Sergeant Major Tim Walz is a twenty-four-year veteran of the Army National Guard, now retired but still on active duty when a visit from President George W. Bush shortly before the 2004 election coincided with Walz’s homecoming to Mankato, Minnesota. A high school teacher and football coach, he had left to serve overseas in Operation Enduring Freedom. Southern Minnesota is home to a large Guard contingent that includes Walz’s unit, the First 125th Field Artillery Battalion, so the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are naturally a pressing local concern–particularly to high school students headed into the armed services.
The president’s visit struck Walz as a teachable moment, and he and two students boarded a Bush campaign bus that took them to a quarry where the president was to speak. But after they had passed through a metal detector and their tickets and IDs were checked, they were denied admittance and ordered back onto the bus. One of the boys had a John Kerry sticker on his wallet.
Indignant, Walz refused. “As a soldier, I told them I had a right to see my commander-in-chief,” the normally jovial forty-one-year-old recently explained to a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party dinner in the small town of Albert Lea, Minnesota.
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.
They did not.
Instead Walz was told to behave himself and permitted to attend the speech, albeit under heavy scrutiny. His students were not: they were sent home. Shortly after this Walz retired from the Guard. Then he did something that until recently was highly unusual for a military man. He announced he was running for Congress–as a Democrat.
Later in Green’s article, Tim Dunn, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel, is mentioned. Dunn is running as a Democrat in North Carolina’s eighth congressional district. He talked with Green regarding concerns over health care and economic assistance for veterans.
Green summarized his experience of of talking with Dunn as well as other veteran declared candidates:
“Above all there was a diffuse and mounting frustration with Washington, most often summed up in military idiom as a “crisis of leadership.”
