To nobody’s surprise, CBS News’ hack-tivist debate moderators allowed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s myriad lies about his military service to go unaddressed during Tuesday’s 2024 vice-presidential debate.
While finding time to ask dishonest questions about baby-killing and Jan. 6, neither Norah O’Donnell nor Margaret Brennan bothered to ask Walz about how he regularly inflated his rank and lied about details surrounding his time in the Army National Guard to boost his political career.
For example, on numerous occasions the Minnesota Democrat portrayed himself as a retired command sergeant major. While it’s true that Walz was promoted to command sergeant major during the waning years of his service, he did not complete the minimum number of years required to retain the rank when he abandoned his unit before it deployed to Iraq and is actually a lesser-ranked master sergeant.
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Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate has also falsified the circumstances of his overseas deployment. Speaking about gun violence at a campaign event in 2018, Walz said, “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”
The problem? Walz never carried so-called “weapons of war” in a combat zone because he was never deployed to one. As The Federalist’s Matt Kittle noted, his Guard unit “was called up early in the war in Iraq — to Italy.”
If those weren’t egregious enough, Walz also previously lied about reenlisting after the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States and reportedly endorsed a book that falsely claimed he served in Afghanistan.
[READ: The Ignominy Of Master Sergeant Timothy Walz]
Tuesday night’s debate offered a rare opportunity for Walz to be questioned on his stolen valor controversy. The only notable moment in which he’s been pressed on the subject was during he and Harris’ sit-down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash in August.
When pressed by Bash on his “weapons of war” remark, Walz blamed his lie on bad grammar.
“Yeah, I said we were talking in this case, this was after a school shooting, the ideas of carrying these weapons of war,” he said. “And my wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar is not always correct.”