Walz

[mellowtigger]

I said I was going to write about Walz as a Vice President nominee in this USA election cycle. I'm almost out of time, so here are some thoughts.

Click to read about Tim Walz...

I will describe Walz as "imminently practical". It seems very weird to me that media keeps trying to paint Walz as a progressive of some kind. He's certainly a liberal, but I've never thought of him as progressive. True, a quarter-century ago, he was a high school adviser for a gay-straight alliance for students. The first sentence of this UK news article does a good job describing the nature of Tim Walz: "A straight, football-coaching national guardsman wasn’t the LGBT+ ally that Seth Elliot Meyer expected."

Okay, a quarter-century ago, maybe that was progressive for most places in the USA. Here in Minnesota, though, civics and community are broadly accepted ideas (unlike conservatism in many places), so it wasn't radical progressivism to think that people should be treated equally. Sure, some people learn to behave differently, and Walz had issues at the high school to help un-teach bad habits, so they could maintain that ideal.

Fast forward to recent years with Walz as Governor of Minnesota. Actual progressive voices have been calling for legalization of marijuana for many years. Not Walz. It's only after conservative forces started siphoning votes away from the liberal party by spawning multiple political parties for marijuana legalization that Walz stepped before the microphone to say he would sign legislation if it came to him. Such legislation arrived, and he did sign the proposal into law. He and Democrats acted on this issue ONLY AFTER it became apparent that they were actually losing votes, or might gain new ones. They were not progressive on this issue, they were practical.

As for "the riots"... again, Walz was practical. Conservatives today are trying to criticize him for not immediately sending the military in to crush the people watching the police station burn. (Fyi, it was imported agitators who set the fire. Half of them were white, and none of them were from Minneapolis proper, although some lived nearby. They were named Dylan Shakespeare Robinson, Branden Michael Wolfe, Bryce Michael Williams, and Davon De-Andre Turner, if you want to look up the news stories about them.) We have a little thing called "law" here in Minnesota, and Walz followed it. He can only deploy troops under specific conditions, and our lousy Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey did not provide sufficient specifications for military engagement with the domestic population here. Frey argues it was Walz's fault, but I believe Walz held the proper line, requiring very clear justification and rules of engagement before sending armed troops into a Minnesota city. When he got that clear directive, he sent the troops. Conservatives ought to be glad of such jurisprudence, such hesitation to deploy armed troops against citizenry, with their "Don't Tread On Me" flags. I am unhappy with their hypocrisy on this matter.

I expect Walz would perform similarly as Vice President, tackling tough issues but only with practicality in mind.