XPost: alt.fraud, free.tampon.tim.walz, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
   From: yourdime@outlook.com   
      
   Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has surely benefited from his portrayal as the   
   country’s “football dad.” But he wouldn’t have passed the truth test in my   
   father’s household, where lying was ranked as the highest punishable   
   offense.   
      
   I’m not saying that Walz lies, precisely. But he tends to gild his résumé   
   for political gain. He’s hardly the first to do this. And it’s not always   
   detrimental to one’s career, as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) has   
   proved. Blumenthal claimed to be a Vietnam veteran even though he sought   
   and received at least five deferments to avoid serving in the war.   
      
   Walz, too, is a bit of a fibber.   
      
   Take his 1995 arrest for drunken and reckless driving. Walz, then a 31-   
   year-old high school teacher, was clocked at 96 mph in a 55-mph zone in   
   Nebraska. He was pulled over by a state trooper, who, upon smelling   
   alcohol, asked Walz to take a field sobriety test, which he failed. Walz   
   then submitted to a hospital for a blood test, which revealed his blood   
   alcohol level to be 0.128, well above the state’s legal limit.   
      
   All this information is recorded in police records, yet during Walz’s 2006   
   congressional campaign, the press was told that he hadn’t been drinking,   
   that he drove himself to the police station and that the reason he failed   
   his field sobriety test was because of a misunderstanding related to   
   hearing loss from his time in the National Guard artillery unit.   
      
   In 2018, when Walz was running for governor of Minnesota, he came clean   
   and admitted to drinking and driving. Telling the truth eventually is   
   better than never at all, I suppose — and Walz now refers to his   
   incarceration that night as life-changing. Today, his go-to beverage is   
   Diet Mountain Dew. But Walz’s prevarications didn’t stop there.   
      
   Now, admittedly, there’s lying and then there’s LYING. When Walz said he   
   and his wife wouldn’t have their two children if not for in vitro   
   fertilization, he was pointing to his Republican opponent, Sen. JD Vance,   
   whom Walz accused of wanting to eliminate IVF as a fertility option. But   
   the Walzes did not, in fact, use IVF, according to his wife, Gwen Walz,   
   who clarified the record in a statement. The couple went another less-   
   expensive, less-invasive route — intrauterine insemination — which is also   
   less ethically challenging because, unlike with IVF, no embryos are   
   created outside the womb.   
      
   This might seem a small deviation from the truth if Walz hadn’t been using   
   the anecdote to attack Vance on a false premise. Both Vance and former   
   president Donald Trump are on record as supporting IVF.   
      
   Meanwhile, it is doubtful that Walz concerns himself much with the ethics   
   of “women’s reproductive health,” including abortion, since he signed a   
   bill last year that would no longer require doctors to preserve the life   
   of infants who survive abortion. Whereas Minnesota law used to require   
   medical personnel to “preserve the life and health of the born alive   
   infant,” the Walz-approved law says only that doctors “care for the infant   
   who is born alive.”   
      
   So “care” can mean “let die,” if one’s conscience permits.   
      
   Such deceptive language is the stuff of nightmares and leads to the gulag.   
   Walz’s administration cloaks reality with words that neither offend nor   
   inform. Then he employs soothing love language to justify turning   
   Minnesota into a sanctuary state for children seeking transgender   
   treatments. Everybody is welcome in Minnesota, he says, but he also   
   believes that children, in some cases, should be allowed access to   
   surgical and chemical procedures without the consent of their parents.   
      
   And you thought Republicans were dangerous.   
      
   It’s almost certain that Walz won’t be giving any “big solo interviews”   
   because, according to Politico, he “might not have a full command of where   
   Harris is on every issue.” This is certainly understandable, as Harris has   
   changed her positions on several issues since Democrats made her the   
   emergency presidential nominee five weeks ago.   
      
   Harris seems to prefer that she and Walz grant only joint interviews,   
   which, as Politico said, “tend to be softer and focus more on the   
   relationships between the two candidates.” No tough questions, in other   
   words. Morning show softballs may give comfort to the ill-prepared, but   
   they deny viewers the content they need to be better-informed voters.   
   Nothing about the pair’s first (taped) interview Thursday night, with   
   CNN’s Dana Bash, satisfied that imperative. Although Harris handled the   
   interview relatively well, Walz seemed to be a mixed-up mess.   
      
   He answered none of the four questions he was asked, including whether he   
   had misspoken when he said he had carried a gun “in war” when he never was   
   deployed to a combat zone. A simple “yes” might have sufficed, but instead   
   he sputtered evasive nonsense and, to be rhetorically accurate,   
   gobbledygook.   
      
   Walz’s Midwestern charm and “tonic masculinity,” to quote a Post   
   colleague, might work for state politics and political rallies, but voters   
   don’t need their tires changed — or a new gutter. They need to feel   
   confident that Walz can capably step into the presidency if need be.   
      
   There’s no reason to believe Harris picked Walz because of his avuncular   
   antics or his image as a great father, the latter of which should be   
   assumed as normal, not celebrated as something rare.   
      
   As Harris’s repackaging team tweaked her record to make her seem like a   
   moderate, she studiously selected as her running mate the country’s most   
   liberal governor — a man who just happens to fudge reality, exaggerate his   
   accomplishments and invent half-truths to burnish his résumé.   
      
   And to think, the Democratic Party’s big pitch in Chicago was character.   
      
   https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/30/tim-walz-half-truths-   
   record/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)