Ah, the tempest teapot of vice-presidential campaigns: Republican veep nominee JD Vance, Senator from Ohio, accuses Democratic veep nominee apparent Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, of engaging in “stolen valor garbage.”

Vance’s allegations seem to involve three components:

First, that Walz retired from the National Guard after 24 years in infantry and artillery jobs, instead of adding another hitch so as to deploy with his unit to Iraq (the unit received its orders two months after he submitted his retirement paperwork).

Second, that while Minnesota’s official government web site described Walz’s rank at retirement as Command Sergeant Major, he actually retired as a Master Sergeant because he hadn’t completed the Sergeants Major Academy while holding the job of (envelope, please) Command Sergeant Major.

And third, that Walz referred in passing to “weapons of war, that I carried in war” in an anti-gun-rights rant. Walz never carried a weapon in war, if for no other reason than that the US hasn’t been — legally/constitutionally speaking — at war since 1945, two decades before his birth. He almost certainly carried, at least, a side arm, during periods when the US military was engaged in combat, even though he didn’t see any himself.

Vance, on the other hand, served one enlistment in the US Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq as a “combat correspondent” who, by his own admission, saw no “combat.” I suspect he carried a weapon in that (pseudo-)war. So valor! Much rifle!

I seldom speak “as a veteran,” but “as a veteran” (and, by the way, a Marine who ran for vice-president 16 years before Vance, appearing on the ballot in Tennessee for the Boston Tea Party), I find this line of gotcha name-calling, and the whole concept of “stolen valor,” boring and silly.

A veteran is just a former government employee who may have held, but didn’t necessarily hold, a job with “kill people” in its description of usual duties. There’s nothing inherently more “valorous” about that than there is to any other government jobs/workfare program; “valor” is a rare individual occurrence, not an automatic attribute of “service.”

As for false or embellished claims as to the character of a veteran’s work, who cares?

Family-friendly version of an old saying: The difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale begins “once upon a time …” while a sea story begins “no kidding, you’re not gonna believe this …”

Neither of these two politicians seems to have embellished his record to any wild degree — if I had a dollar for every “former US Navy SEAL” I’ve met, I’d have more dollars than the number of SEALs who’ve ever existed — and given Vance’s need to nitpick at this level of triviality, I doubt any new bombshells are wired for later detonation.

And if the idea of “stolen valor” bothers you, you’ve got too much time on your hands and probably a tendency toward unjustified grievance. Some idiot wearing an “unearned” Medal of Honor neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg. Get over it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As Americans take August to process the presidential race upheavals of July, the most consequential may prove to be a union leader garnering wild cheers for declaring that “the biggest recipients of welfare in this country are corporations … we must put workers first!”

In the twentieth century, such campaign rhetoric was heard of only at the margins from the likes of Ralph Nader and Eugene Debs, not from any respectable Democrat, let alone a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention. Yet Teamsters president Sean O’Brien draws on enough mainstream discontent to position himself as a counter to “the extremes in both parties,” less than a year after conservatives united against actors’ and teachers’ union strikes.

They’re still a long way from warming to those professions. Another 2024 RNC big shot may have been dubbed “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan, but the lead of the Jordan Belfort-produced turkey Santa With Muscles lacks the star power of Batman and Robin‘s George Clooney.

Meanwhile, when Trump’s running mate JD Vance got the nod from O’Brien for having “the courage to sit down and consider points of view that aren’t funded by big money think tanks,” he wasn’t talking about what Vance learned at Yale. Republicans are as reluctant to laud their candidate’s choice to complete college as Democrats are to take Kamala Harris to task for not speaking out against early 2020s class closures after having been heavy-handed as a prosecutor on kids who skipped school.

An earlier Democratic nominee was distinctly less enthusiastic about imposing educational choices. In a 1988 introduction to John Holt’s How Children Fail, George McGovern noted that he had read the original edition during his 1972 bid and that “a visit to schools in any part of the nation will reveal the same uninspired children and lack of attention to what is being taught of which John Holt wrote.” Given such a status quo, “there is nothing lost and much to be gained in encouraging children to follow their own curiosity about life and to build on their own personal interests.”

The Cato Institute which exemplifies “big money think tanks” for liberals (while getting lip service from big-spending conservatives) reached leftward in 1977 with a denunciation of “schools that promise equal enlightenment [but] generate unequally degrading meritocracy and lifelong dependence on further tutorship” by Ivan Illich in the first issue of Inquiry magazine. They succeeded in getting Anthony Burgess and Noam Chomsky to write for later issues.

In The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, historian Rick Perlstein sees a Reagan “obsessed with preserving the factory system” as his own stardom faded, quipping that “the future champion of individualism and entrepreneurship despised the new, more individualistic, entrepreneurial Hollywood.” Such values, fully compatible with free association, can usher teachers’ unions into an educational environment as far from the longstanding model of a factory-like assembly line as today’s unionized filmmakers are from the dream factory studios of yore — with comparable paydays above scale for popular talent.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “COMMENTARY: When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times-News [Twin Falls, Idaho], August 8, 2024
2. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, August 8, 2024
3. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], August 8, 2024
4. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], August 8, 2024
5. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], August 8, 2024
6. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], August 8, 2024
7. “What unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Elizabethton, Tennessee Star, August 9, 2024
8. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, September 4, 2024

On July 31, retired brigadier general Susan K. Escallier signed a pretrial agreement under which Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi would have pleaded guilty to various roles in the terror attacks of 9/11 in return for sentences of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. On August 1, bending to outrage (real and feigned) over the matter, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin revoked the deal.

The case may seem unrelated to last month’s US Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States, granting presidential immunity for “official acts” — an immunity manufactured from whole cloth in contradiction to both the plain text of  the US Constitution and the entire history of American jurisprudence.  The two stories however, are of a piece.

The three defendants have spent their last two decades in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. If they’d been charged and tried as ordinary criminals in federal court, they’d have almost certainly found themselves quickly convicted, shortly thereafter sentenced to death, and long since dead, like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (about six years from crime to execution).

That’s not a comment on their guilt or innocence; it’s just recognition that finding a jury which WOULDN’T convict them and recommend a sentence of death would have been extraordinarily unlikely given the climate of the time.

But former president George W. Bush just wasn’t having any of this Constitution stuff. Whether or not he actually called the Supreme Law of the Land “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as a later retracted article claimed, he certainly treated it that way.

The US government, under Bush and with the cooperation of Congress and, in parts, the Supreme Court, simply seized power to declare people “unlawful enemy combatants,” try them via military tribunal instead of the constitutionally required court/jury system — if it tried them at all instead of just having them murdered, as Barack Obama and Donald Trump later did — all while holding them indefinitely in violation of the Constitution’s “speedy public trial” requirements and torturing them in violation of its “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibition (as well as international law).

Let me say this again by way of emphasis, because it’s important:

If the constitutional requirements had been followed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi would almost certainly have been killed by lethal injection years ago.

The way these three alleged terrorist masterminds were treated wasn’t about achieving justice.

It wasn’t about “winning the war on terror.”

It wasn’t about preventing future attacks.

It was about implementing George W. Bush’s kingly view of presidential power: “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”

The SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity in Trump’s case affirmed that claim, ensuring that neither Bush nor his predecessors or successors need ever fear they’ll face justice — even the kind of justice denied Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi — and that their victims will never RECEIVE justice for crimes committed against them by modern American monarchs.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY