Part 2: More on the swift boating of Gov. Walz

Trump surrogates and prominent supporters continue to generate new lies in desperation, to try and keep the story in the news

In a prior post - The despicable Swift Boating of Gov. Tim Walz and his 24 years of National Guard service - I addressed and debunked three major lies being spread about Vice-Presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz. As I summarized in that post:

• Gov. Walz has been truthful about his service and rank.

• He did not retire because he was asked to report for duty and go to Iraq. Rather, he decided to retire many months prior and filed to run for Congress well before his official retirement date, which in turn significantly pre-dated his unit being notified of a deployment to Iraq (that happened the following year).

• Gov. Walz had not claimed that he did combat duty in Afghanistan - and he had even specifically pointed out that he had not done combat duty. He truthfully said that he was deployed in Europe to support the war effort associated with Operating Enduring Freedom, as many others stationed outside Afghanistan have also pointed out.

The increasingly desperate and flailing Trump campaign, their surrogates and prominent social media supporters are trying hard to keep this story in the news, in the hope that media outlets other than Fox fall for their gambit to smear Walz, and by extension Vice President and Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Here are two more recent examples that have been debunked this weekend.

The first false claim is that a person named John Kolb was Walz’s battalion commander and that Kolb has written a scathing attack on Walz’s leadership. In fact, Brandon Friedman points out that Kolb was not Walz’s Battalion Commander when Walz was in the National Guard.

As you can see, Kolb didn't take over Walz's battalion until six months after Walz had filed to run for Congress and nearly three months after he'd retired and left. Here's the link with dates of command: https://ngmnpublic.azurewebsites.us/minnesota-national-guard-staff-lineages/

It's important to get the word out on this because Trumpers are going nuts over it. And it's completely false. Walz retired months before Kolb took over the battalion. This is a fact-free political smear campaign.

Further, in a different story in the New York Times, many fellow soldiers who were asked about Walz had positive things to say about him, including one of his Battalion Commanders:

Mr. Walz, now Minnesota governor and the presumptive Democratic candidate for vice president, raised his hand to join the Army National Guard just two days past his 17th birthday on April 8, 1981. In a career in the military that spanned three decades, he battled floods, managed an artillery unit and achieved one of the highest enlisted ranks in the Army. He also navigated a full-time job teaching social studies alongside his part-time military occupation as an enlisted combat arms soldier, a role that trained him for war.

[…]

Supporters say he served honorably for 24 years and had long since earned the right to retire from the Guard when he chose.

“In talking with him, it was a hard decision,” said Joseph Eustice, a soldier who served under Mr. Walz until his departure. “The guy I knew in the Guard, I’d walk through a wall for.”

[…]

Even his most vocal opponents in the Guard agree that Mr. Walz was a respected soldier — someone who did his job dependably and could be counted on to take care of his troops.

[…]

“He was a good soldier,” said Bill Kautt who was Mr. Walz’s battalion commander during the short deployment to Norway. “I think he was a respected member of the Guard and he did his job.”

Mr. Walz was the chief of one of the unit’s howitzer batteries and joined the exercise as the battalion’s operations sergeant in the command group and worked closely with Mr. Kautt.

[…]

“I was very impressed with him,” Mr. Kautt said. “I would consider him energetic. He was dependable and he was willing to do whatever we asked him to do.”

But his time in an artillery unit came at a cost to his health, despite not seeing combat. The deafening booms and shock waves from howitzer barrels and their projectiles, which sound like freight trains as they fly overhead, left Mr. Walz with hearing loss and tinnitus in both ears, according to a 2018 report from Minnesota Public Radio. In 2005 he underwent corrective surgery to alleviate the problem, the report said.

[…]

In the twilight of his time in the Guard, before he retired in 2005 to run for Congress, Mr. Walz deployed to Vincenza, Italy in 2003. His artillery battalion was charged with guarding entry control points at Air Force bases that were supporting the war in Afghanistan as U.S. forces sought to capture or kill Al Qaeda’s leadership there.

The second false claim relates to another video of then Rep. Walz that was posted on social media with the claim that he lied in the video by claiming to have been deployed in Afghanistan. Multiple people have pointed out that this claim is a flagrant lie - for example, here’s James Surowiecki:

Yet another example of the strange [right wing] habit of making a false claim while linking to a clip that shows their claim is false.

Nowhere in this clip does Walz tell the gold-star family that he was deployed to Afghanistan.

Further, former Trump campaign advisor A. J. Delgado, commented on another video doing the rounds:

LOL. This is so dumb. He says he carried weapons "in war." He DID. He served in Europe, after we had gone to war with Afghanistan, preparing and training security forces there. Now, if he'd said he carried weapons in "active combat" then, yes, that would probably be misleading.

In this context, it’s worth recalling what Roger Misso said in his Twitter thread:

I supported Operation Enduring Freedom.

I never set foot in Afghanistan.

How?

I flew off of an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean supporting troops on the ground.

Much like Tim Walz supported OEF in Italy and Turkey through base security to support troops on the ground.

The inability for some folks to understand what OEF is - and that tens of thousands of servicemembers supported it from outside of Afghanistan - is a commentary on how little the American public supported or understood our presence there.

That’s not on Gov Walz - that’s on you.

What’s more, there would be no OEF without Gov Walz, me, and the thousands of servicemembers who supported the effort from ships and bases all over the CENTCOM, INDOPACOM, and EUCOM AORs.

To suggest otherwise is wrong and troublingly ignorant about military readiness.

Amen.