Tag: JD Vance

You Don’t Send Me Weapons Anymore

W.J. Astore

The Disastrous Oval Office Meeting Between Trump and Zelensky

It’s never a good idea to bite the hand that feeds you. In effect, that’s what President Zelensky did yesterday in a contentious meeting with President Trump and Vice President Vance.

Bloodbath? Showdown? Blow-up? Or a rare example of backroom brawling in plain sight?

My email this morning featured many takes on the meeting from the media. Here are a few choice words: Showdown. Dispute. Debacle. Blow-up. Botched visit. Bloodbath. Feud.

It must have been strange for Zelensky. He’s used to coming to DC and getting his way. Of being feted and fawned over. Who does he think he is, Bibi Netanyahu? Bibi has AIPAC and Congress behind him, and lord knows who and what else. Zelensky, to borrow from Trump, doesn’t have those cards. His hand is weaker and he didn’t play it well.

Matt Taibbi has an article on the meeting with a full (if imperfect) transcript. Check it out here. Taibbi is generally critical of Zelensky; the historian Timothy Snyder is critical of the “inhospitable” and “indecent” Trump/Vance. Check out Snyder’s video here. 

As I watched the video from the Oval Office, and heard Zelensky’s complaints, I almost thought he was going to break out his rendition of the Streisand/Diamond duet, “You don’t bring me flowers anymore,” except with new lyrics:

You don’t send me weapons anymore.

Joking aside, it’s rare when you see backroom brawling in the open. These meetings before the press are usually so staged, so vapid, and often so dishonest that it was refreshing to see something unscripted, spontaneous, and impassioned.

Here, I recall Winston Churchill’s quip that “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” Zelensky may find that he’s lost his most powerful ally; then again, perhaps he believed he’d already lost Trump/Vance, thus he seized his chance to be defiant and to go out strong.

I don’t know. It takes a clever man to play a weak hand well and a lucky one to win with it. And I don’t think Zelensky is either clever or lucky enough here.

Governor Tim Walz’s Military Record

W.J. Astore

Questionable Assertions, but Not “Stolen Valor”

Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for Vice President, has come under fire about his military record. Leading the charge has been another Vice President nominee, J.D. Vance of the Republican Party, who served in the Marines and deployed to Iraq.

A young Tim Walz. Little did that young man know how this photo and his military service would become yet another battleground in American politics, generating plenty of heat but very little light

Let’s use the Army acronym of BLUF (bottom line up front); in other words, let’s cut to the chase:

  1. Tim Walz has said he retired as a command sergeant major (CSM) after 24 years of service in the Army National Guard. While he did serve as CSM for his battalion, he didn’t attend the Sergeants Major Academy and therefore he retired a step down as a master sergeant (MSG).
  2. When Tim Walz retired in 2005, he was preparing to run for Congress. His unit was also preparing to deploy to Iraq, which it eventually did in March of 2006. Walz was well within his rights as a soldier to retire when he did. Whether he did so to avoid war service in Iraq is known only to Walz. He claims he’d made his decision to retire before his unit was notified of its overseas deployment to Iraq.
  3. Tim Walz has talked loosely about using weapons of war “that he carried in war,” implying he’d seen combat service when he hadn’t. I don’t see this as a case of “stolen valor.” He wasn’t boasting about being some kind of badass hero in war. Obviously, in 24 years of service in the Army National Guard, he’d carried weapons of war and trained with them under simulated combat conditions “down range.” He should have simply said: “I’ve trained extensively with weapons of war.” Period.

Does any of this matter? Not to me. Tim Walz, by all accounts, served honorably, reaching the senior enlisted ranks. If the Army had wanted him to stay instead of retiring, he could have been stop-lossed or his retirement request could have been denied. He moved on to Congress, winning his election in 2006. He seems to be a person motivated by public service.

The issues that really matter here aren’t mentioned by the Republicans or the corporate-owned news (the CON). Here are those issues:

  1. Tim Walz is a strong supporter of Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
  2. Tim Walz is a strong supporter of massive military aid to Ukraine.
  3. To my knowledge, Tim Walz has not criticized the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) in meaningful ways, though he has spoken out against the idea of China being an inevitable U.S. enemy.

Tim Walz, in short, is a typical pro-Israel, pro-Ukraine, generally pro-MICC, Democrat.

The most important issue of all is the whole idea that one must go to war—to serve in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and, more likely than not, to kill other human beings, to prove one’s “valor” in uniform. Why is carrying and using a gun in war such a great and glorious thing? Especially wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq that were based on lies? Would we respect Tim Walz more if he’d gone to Iraq in 2006 and shot up some Iraqis in the cause of “freedom”?

As a candidate for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump famously denounced the Iraq War, using words like “stupid,” “dumb,” a “total disaster.” and a “big fat mistake.” The war was based on a lie, Trump said, about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Even worse, the Bush/Cheney administration was behind the lie, leading to a war that destabilized the Middle East, costing the U.S. military thousands of lives and U.S. taxpayers $2 trillion, Trump concluded.

Under that bright blaze of honesty from Trump (yes, you read that right), we might question anyone who wants to trumpet service in Iraq as praiseworthy in the sense of “bringing freedom” or “spreading democracy.”