Stromata Blog: Quote of the Day: Tim Walz in Iraq AND Afghanistan

Usually Reliable Sources

Worth Reading (Fiction)

Mamet, David: Chicago: A Novel
In Roaring 20's Chicago, a Great War veteran turned hard-boiled reporter falls in love with the wrong woman and then seeks to find her killer.
Nelson DeMille: The Cuban Affair: A Novel
Two million dollars to charter a boat for a fishing tournament? A great way for the owner to pay off the boat's mortgage, but it turns out to include slipping into Castro's prison island in search of a lost (and perhaps imaginary) treasure.
Kate Atkinson: Life After Life: A Novel
Ursula Todd has the opportunity to relive her life, over and over and over, moving steadily through the Great War and its sequels and accumulating shards of memory.
Connie Willis: Crosstalk: A Novel
An empathy app leads to complications involving telepathy, Irish women and a true love that runs most unsmoothly. Classic Willis comedy.
Mark Steyn: The Prisoner of Windsor
In a 21st Century sequel to Anthony Hope, the heir to the Ruritanian throne must fill in for the kidnaped Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Tim Powers: My Brother's Keeper
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Tim Powers: Declare: A Novel
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H.F.M. Prescott: The Man on a Donkey
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Theodore Odrach: Wave of Terror
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Simon Montefiore: Sashenka: A Novel
Both grim and funny, this historical novel peers into the inner world of an upper class Russian girl turned loyal Bolshevik, highlighting her youthful fling at revolution-making in Petrograd, her fall from grace under Stalin, and an historian's effort, after the end of communism, to ascertain her fate.
Harry Turtledove: The Man with the Iron Heart
Can the U.S. maintain its resolve against a defeated enemy's terrorist campaign? Imagining a post-World War II Nazi insurgency, Harry Turtledove puts this question into a new context. As Reinhard von Heydrich's "werewolves" devastate Germany, war-weary Americans call for withdrawal, regardless of the consequences.
Neal Stephenson: Anathem
If you have not a smidgen of interest in how Platonic philosophy relates to the "many worlds" version of quantum mechanics, you still may like this novel, though you'll probably wish that the characters talked less. Persevere. After a slow start, the story grows compelling, and the intellectual dialogues turn out not to be digressions.
Alfred Duggan: Lord Geoffrey's Fancy
Perhaps the finest book of one of England's finest historical novelists. The setting is 13th Century Greece, where Crusaders fought each other and the shattered Byzantine Empire. The history is accurate, the writing graceful and the characters not merely modern people in fancy dress.
Rodney Bolt: History Play : The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe
A pseudo-history springing from the premise that Shakespeare's flashy predecessor survived the famous Deptford brawl and fled to the continent, where he secretly wrote almost all of the Bard's works. A clever, tongue-in-cheek reworking of literary history that also recreates the milieu shared by many real Elizabethan exiles.
Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays (Library of America, 131)
Fiction and essays by a black American writer who deserves a wider audience.
Harry Turtledove: Gunpowder Empire
Debut of a juvenile series set in parallel worlds. 22nd century teen siblings, trapped without adult aid in a besieged city, must cope with the bizarre (to them) customs and prejudices of a never-fallen Roman Empire.

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Monday, August 12, 2024

Quote of the Day: Tim Walz in Iraq AND Afghanistan

The indefatigable Steven Hayward, writing at PowerLine, has excavated a striking paragraph from a speech Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, now the understudy in Kamala Harris’s “Campaign of Joy”:

I had the privilege of serving in this state’s national guard. I stood one night in the dark of night on the tarmac at Bagram Air Base in Iraq and watched a military ramp ceremony–a soldier’s body being loaded onto a plane to be returned home. And if you’ve seen it, you don’t leave the same. It makes you wonder, what are we doing? What are we trying to get to? And then watching as all of you have been, the confusing last few weeks with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]

Tim Walz, “Remarks at the Minnesota 9/11 20th Anniversary Commemoration, September 11, 2021”, reprinted in Minnesota in the Global War on Terrorism, Post-9/11 Profiles, p. 374 (394 of the PDF).

Mr. Hayward comments:

First, Bagram Air Base was in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Second, did Walz ever visit either Iraq or Afghanistan? If he did, it wasn’t on an official guard deployment – that much has been nailed down. It is exceedingly unlikely that he was ever present for a military ramp ceremony of a fallen soldier in either nation. He made this up out of whole cloth. Full stop. (Stay tuned: He’ll claim again that he “misspoke,” and was present when a plane from Bagram landed in Minnesota, if he hasn’t claimed this already.)

I think that the Walz “stolen valor” controversy has now been resolved.

Posted by Tom Veal on Monday, August 12, 2024 at 11:23 AM in Current Affairs, Election 2024, War on Terror | Permalink

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Books by Tom Veal

Strange Tales for Strange Times
Get the stories shown below plus more in one inexpensive package.
The Miracle Wrought by Silas Gantry
What if everyone believed in miracles?
Igor's Campaign: A Tale of Ambition
The World Science Fiction Convention comes to Yeltsin-era Russia.
The Monkey and the Amazon: A Tale of Illusions
Intrigue, disguise and magic in Hellenistic Babylon.
Daimon Born: The First Adventure of Theagonistes
A being who dwells between the Moon and the Empyrean makes a (literal) impact on the Earth.
Shadowloves: A Tale of Desire
Where romantic dreams come all too true.
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Hillary Clinton won in 2016, but not as expected. Her narrow victory sparks intrigue, catching a callow reporter in a fast spinning news cycle.

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Bernard Lewis & Butzie Ellis Churchill: Islam: The Religion and the People
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Monday, August 12, 2024

Quote of the Day: Tim Walz in Iraq AND Afghanistan

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