Lucas: Scuttling Walz, Kerry swift boat comparisons
Tim Walz is no John Kerry, despite sympathetic and dishonest comparisons from the left. Nobody is.
Kerry is the former this that or the other of almost everything — war hero, anti-war hero, lieutenant governor, U.S. senator, presidential candidate, Secretary of State and Joe Biden’s climate czar.
Kerry’s name resurfaced after Walz, 60, the governor of Minnesota, and Kamala Harris’ progressive running mate, came under fire from J.D. Vance, 39, and other conservative Republicans over Walz’s decision to forego deployment to Iraq in 2005 to run for Congress instead.
The left-wing media immediately came to Walz’s defense and wrongly compared criticism of Walz to the “swift boating” of John Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran, who was the 2004 Democrat candidate for president.
Kerry back then made his military accomplishments and decorations as a commander of a swift boat the centerpiece of his campaign, even though fellow swift boat veterans challenged them.
Hence the term “swift boating.” Kerry lost the election to Republican George Bush.
Military service is not the center of Walz’s campaign. Loyalty, obsequiousness and subservience to Harris is, but now his service has become an issue.
Walz’s National Guard unit, in which Walz had served for 24 years before retiring, went to Iraq without him in 2005. The troops saw combat and suffered casualties, and Walz was criticized for allegedly bugging out.
Also included in the attack on Walz were his comments at a gun control setting — since walked back— about carrying a weapon of war in combat.
And while Walz did carry a weapon of war during his National Guard service, he did not carry it in any war.
Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, who served in Iraq as a Marine Corps journalist, accused Walz of “stolen valor.”
Trump, who avoided military service during the Vietnam War, called Walz “a disgrace to our country.”
That is probably what Kerry, 80, who joined the U.S. Navy during Vietnam, would say about Trump, 78.
Which brings us to the dishonest campaign by the progressive, left-wing media to drum up sympathy and support for Walz by comparing the attacks on his military record to the attacks on Kerry’s Vietnam War record when he ran for president in 2004.
Indicative of this was a Boston Globe story in which the paper quoted progressive U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, 36, of Newton, a Marine veteran of Afghanistan who, like the reporter, was not even born during the Vietnam War.
Auchincloss said, “I think we saw 20 years ago with the swift boating of John Kerry, who served honorably in Vietnam that we are not going to be pliant in this.”
He was joined in his criticism of Vance by Rep. Seth Moulton, 46, another Marine Corps veteran who, like Auchincloss, also was not born during the war in Vietnam.
Kerry’s Vietnam War detractors, some of whom served with him in 1970, questioned how Kerry was able to win three Purple Hearts — they said were for scratches — as well as a Bronze Star and a Silver Star in the three months he served commanding a swift boat. That would be an astonishing five medals in three months.
No sooner did Kerry return as a war hero than he morphed into an anti-war hero and launched his political career.
And in doing so he, without any documentation or evidence, smeared his fellow soldiers, who were still fighting in Vietnam, by accusing them of committing war crimes.
Walz, as Minnesota governor, only insulted his former National Guard mates as “nineteen-year-old cooks” during the 2020 George Floyd riots that burned Minneapolis down.
In his famous — or notorious — testimony before a Senate committee in 1971 Kerry, then 27-years old, related stories he had “heard” about U.S. soldiers who razed villages, cut ears, heads and limbs off Vietnamese, shot civilians, tortured prisoners and shot cattle and dogs “for fun.”
This is what the United States “made them do,” Kerry said, and that it was “reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”
After making a career out of smearing men who had fought, and were still fighting for their country in Vietnam, Kerry later became a war hero again by making his Vietnam War experience the centerpiece of his campaign for president.
“My name is John Kerry, and I am reporting for duty,” he said saluting upon winning the Democrat Party nomination in 2004.
Tim Walz is no John Kerry. Nobody is.
Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com