Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Should criticism of a veteran’s military record be off limits even when that veteran is running for public office? Some think so. Here’s the Western Word’s Mike Brown this morning in a must read post:
I’ve written several times this campaign season that I don’t like it when people criticize a veteran’s military record – be it Republican or Democrat or whatever party. It especially annoys me when those doing the attacking did not serve. Considering how many e-mails I received about it, there are several fellow veterans who feel the same way.
It shows a total lack of respect for the veteran.
Mike makes some good points, but I don’t fully agree with him. Once a veteran throws his hat in the political ring, he becomes a public figure whose background, civilian and military, should and will be scrutinized. We have the right to know, and the duty to find out, if a candidate did something that reflects poorly on his capacity to serve in public office. For example, serving hard time for assault and battery or armed robbery. I’d want to know whether a veteran had been honorably discharged. And I’d sure like to know whether the military service of a candidate for, say, governor, showed a propensity for the kind of judgment upon which Oliver North built his reputation.
What I don’t need to know, however, is whether a soldier was denied a 3-day pass because of a minor infraction of the rules, or whether a 20-year-old sailor drank himself into a stupor and was returned to base by the shore patrol. Very little if any of that retains relevance 20 or 30 years later.
In an age when most candidates have not served, Montana has two candidates for federal office who are retired career military officers. Democrat John Walsh, running for election to the U.S. Senate seat to which he was appointed in February, served 30 years in the Army, commanding soldiers in combat, and rising to Adjutant General of the Montana National Guard. Republican Ryan Zinke, running for the U.S. House of Representatives, served two decades in the U.S. Navy, becoming a Navy SEAL, retiring with the rank of commander.
Now they’re both under fire from critics in the opposing political party. As I reported last week, Walsh’s National Guard service is being smeared by mendacious television ads run by and approved by his Republican opponent, Rep. Steve Daines. And Zinke is under attack by Democrats for alleged financial improprieties while he was a Navy SEAL. Montana’s Democratic Party now demands that Zinke release his service records to prove he’s clean (and to open a lake of information in which Democratic operatives can fish for Gotchas).
We don’t need this. Neither Walsh nor Zinke is another Ollie North or John Poindexter. Walsh strikes me as a prosaic technocrat who made every effort to serve and protect the men and women he commanded. Zinke, whom I’ve always liked personally, strikes me as a bit of an operator — who but an operator would have teamed up with Neil Livingstone — but also as a man who gets things done. Yes, they made a few minor mistakes. But so what? Minor mistakes don’t disqualify people for public office.
Most voters, I believe, want to know what candidates will do to create jobs, build schools, fill potholes, protect clean air and water, avoid more wars, and assure affordable health care for all. And I’m absolutely certain that voters are fed up with Gotcha politics, with the incessant petty sniping over alleged violations of abstruse campaigning rules.
If it turns out that as military men Walsh and/or Zinke committed acts that qualify them for the Ollie North award, scrutiny and criticism of their military service is legitimate and necessary. But no such conduct has been alleged, let alone identified, and I doubt that any will be uncovered. It’s time for Daines to yank his dirty ad, and for the Democrats to stop trying to tarnish Zinke’s military service.