For the longest time, the Left has had a bad attitude toward the military. They used to say that former military should be banned from public office. The argument was based on the belief that their should be a hard line between the military and civilian sides of government. Given that it is the military that has the greatest respect for civilian government, it sounded like a nutty idea.
On the other hand, John McCain makes a good case for banning these guys from serving in Congress. He has built a political career around his military service, by waving his POW experience like a bloody shirt. McCain, wrapping himself and his nutty ideas in the American flag has been one of the more odious scenes in Washington over the last several decades.
Now we have Senator John Walsh (L-Montana) doing the same thing in an effort to squirm out of plagiarism charges.
Sen. John Walsh of Montana said Wednesday his failure to attribute conclusions and verbatim passages lifted from other scholars’ work in his thesis to earn a master’s degree from the U.S. Army War College was an unintentional mistake caused in part by post-traumatic stress disorder.
The apparent plagiarism first reported by The New York Times was the second potentially damaging issue raised this year involving the Democrat’s 33-year military career, which has been a cornerstone of his campaign to keep the seat he was appointed to in February when Max Baucus resigned to become U.S. ambassador to China.
National Democrats said Wednesday they remained “100 percent behind Sen. Walsh” in his campaign against Republican Rep. Steve Daines.
Walsh told The Associated Press when he wrote the thesis, he had PTSD from his service in Iraq, was on medication and was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran’s recent suicide.
“I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor,” the senator said. “My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment.”
The guy’s lone reason for being in the Senate is an exaggerated military career. That’s bad enough, but now he wants to blame PTSD for being a thief and a fraud. Leaving aside the many questionable claims of PTSD, there are no examples of PTSD causing plagiarism. It is an insult to the men struggling with real wartime experiences. Not only did the guy embellish his service to get into Congress, he’s now trying steal the real harm done to soldiers and use it to get out of a jam.
Of course, this is a good example of what happens when you let a ideologues take over your country. If this guy had an “R” next to his name or was a believing Christian, he would have been run out of office by now. His chances for winning re-election would be zero at this point, assuming he ever got into office. This guy not only gets a pass, he has the full support of the Left.
Still, Democrats hoped that the uproar would soon die down, and Walsh could soon return to regular campaigning. They likened the scandal to the 2010 Connecticut Senate race, when it was revealed that Richard Blumenthal never served in Vietnam, contradicting his numerous assertions that he did, as well as the 2012 controversy over whether Elizabeth Warren improperly cited having Native American heritage to advance in her academic career. Warren and Blumenthal eventually won those races.
Just look at the language there. Blumenthal lied about his military service. Warren lied about being an Indian so she could scam the racial spoils system. This is what normal people call fraud, or perhaps tendering a fraudulent device. That device being their tongue. No where in the news story do we see the words “lie” or “fraud” describing their acts. Yet, in the last cycle, Todd Akin and the word “rape” were so often linked in news stories, people assumed it was his given name.
This comes to mind:
