1. I will not play the game of comparing service records as if only those who served the right amount of time, in the right locations, with the right amount of danger are qualified to comment. Every voter in the USA has a stake in this discussion. That doesn’t mean every opinion is valid or valuable. Most are just trivial. My own service record is better than many, not as good as some.

2. A “career” national guardsman versus an enlisted public affairs private? Seriously? This is a pretty low bar for anyone to be arguing over. For those who don’t understand how this works, A typical national guard “career” is at best a part time job on one weekend per month and 2 weeks each summer. Add in the time it takes for certain types of basic training and a 20 year career in the National guard only amounts to about 3 years actually serving in uniform. Whoopdi-freaking-do. The glaring exception to this is deployments. Mr. Walz “missed” a deployment by his unit that amounted to 22 months of continuous active duty in an armpit called Iraq. Even if no one was getting shot, and in 2005 LOTS of people were indeed getting shot, it would have been hardship duty. Mr. Walz obviously ordered his own affairs to avoid hardship and that makes him less of a man. It is more derisible because for 24 years he took the money for “being in the Army” and the one time the Army called for a payback, he suddenly became too busy. Not exactly cowardice, but nothing he should put in his resume either. Any Marine who spent 4 years in uniform would have had more actual military service than Mr. Walz after 24 years. In Mr. Vance’s case, that service in Iraq was a hardship. No Italian hotels. No private air conditioned offices and private rooms like a CSM gets. Vance would have been sleeping in an open bay with 50 of his closest friends. There is no comparison between the service of those two men. One was selfless. The other was self-serving.

3. The party that supported Bill Clinton for President despite his open draft dodging has no high ground on this issue when it comes to Trump’s military service. As a mere technicality, Trump did serve 4 years as commander in chief of the military. During that time, he demonstrated more military virtue than his generals and admirals who wanted to send a missile strike into Iran and kill 40-50 Iranian soldiers who didn’t do anything wrong but get out of bed that morning. Trump refused to take the bait of the Military security state. Bush/Cheney/Powell weren’t as bright and fell for it when the CIA told them there were MWD in Iraq. Clinton wasn’t that smart when the same people told him chems were being made in a baby milk factory. It takes a strong president to willfully choose to refuse the advice of “professional intelligence agencies” and not send men to their deaths over make-believe intelligence data that is designed to manipulate world events. The intelligence community never forgave him for that and went all in on their “Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation” story right before the 2020 election. The news media carried that story instead of carrying the story of decades of Biden family corruption in Ukraine, China, and Russia plus evidence of about 200 other actual felony crimes. Hunter was quite the collector of evidence. Good thing teh FBI is also all in on protecting the Bidens. They have had that laptop since the beginning and have buried it.

4. Military service is not the only path to virtuous service. All those jobs that involve hardship for the sake of others qualify in this regard. The example I like to use is that in the Normandy invasion of WW2, the men who stormed the beach were no doubt heroes. But they could never have gotten to the beach if Andrew Jackson Higgins in Louisiana didn’t build a boat company and manufacture Higgin’s boats to carry them to shore. All those liberty ships, air craft carriers, battleships and destroyers were built by people who never left the USA to go to fight the JAPS or Nazis. None of those ships would have been built if not for tens of thousands of men (no ladies there) working in deep coal mines and iron ore mines. Military effort is a team sport. For every navy SEAL kicking in a door to shoot OBL in the face, there are 100,000 other people making it possible for him to be there.

5. Walz is certainly not the first Democrat to lie about his resume. It’s pretty much expected at this point. The lies will come out and the opposition will carry the message about the lies and the leftist legacy media as well as the new media will cover for the democrats and make sure no one hears about it. If Democrats were not lying, they wouldn’t have anything at all to campaign on. What is far more important and what should be the focus of rational campaigning is a comparison of how each party will govern. VPs do not govern. The position itself is so useless it should just be abolished.

6. In the end. This is still a race between Trump and Obama. Americans need to decide which America they want to live in. After Trump wins, Republicans need to start holding Trump accountable for his failings. Not the make-believe failings that Democrats claim, but his actual failings.

7. Walz was certainly not the only Guardsman or reservist who failed to deploy when called. In 2007 for example, only about 30% of the IRR reservists who were called showed up. Between 2005 and 2007 the Military needed a very large volume of units going to Iraq and Afghanistan and all the supporting bases around the world. LOTS of national guard units failed to deploy on time. The 22 month deployment for Walz’s unit was atypical. A few months of that would have been preparing to go but it was common for units in theater to be involuntarily extended because their replacement units were not ready. Unready units were VERY common in the National guard and the most common reason for lack of readiness was lack of personal in key positions. The lack of a CSM in the unit, could cause the whole battalion to fail to deploy on time while another is found. Meanwhile, there is another unit in Iraq waiting longer before they can come home because some key personnel at the last minute declined. It was also a typical National guard practice to only send volunteers and they would strip down some units of the unwilling and refill them with volunteers from other units. Thus, a Guardsman could find himself on back to back deployments when returning and then joining another unit going straight back. The Guard members who deployed carried back enough honorable service to cover for all the ones who were “too busy running for congress” to do their part.

8. I recall at the time knowing of all the people who had taken the king’s coin for so many years and failing to go when called and thinking, those people really have some severe character problems. It would have been better if they had never put on a uniform at all.

9. Put this into context at the time. The Democratic party had chosen to use the war in Iraq as a campaign issue, even though they had voted to support it. Walz was a democratic party activist even then and sided with those groups that protested the war. His choice to decline service when called may very likely be attributable to political motivations rather than just ambition or cowardice. Of course, his political views didn’t stop him from taking a paycheck for being “in the Army”, when it was just easy duty.