Fox News commentator and author Tyrus nicknamed Kamala Harris “The Giggler” and V.P. candidate Tim Walz “The Snitch.”  The label for Harris stems from her frequent nervous laughter that accompanies her public comments.  Democrat party spin is now portraying the giggling as the politics of joy, and Republicans frame it as a lack of seriousness.  More likely, it is simply a nervous response to uncomfortable situations.  Walz earned the nickname for instigating a telephone hotline during the pandemic for people to inform on neighbors who were seen leaving their homes unmasked.

With the choice of Walz as the Harris V.P. candidate, reports of Walz exaggerating his service record have resurfaced.  The most serious of these is a video where he claims to have held a weapon of war in an actual war zone, something that never happened, as he was never deployed to a war zone.  The second report is that he retired from his post as command sergeant major of his National Guard unit subsequent to learning that his unit would be deployed to Iraq.  Finally, as a result of his retirement before completing special training, his retirement rank was reduced from command sergeant major to simply master sergeant, something he failed to mention in referring to himself in campaign biographies.

Another Democrat party exaggeration about Walz is implying that he was the head coach of a state championship football team.  He was not.  He was an assistant coach.  There is a huge difference between being a head coach and an assistant coach.  Take it from me: I was both for my sons’ youth soccer, basketball, and baseball teams.  There is a world of difference.

When you are an assistant coach, the most trouble you might encounter is a parent asking you to intervene with the head coach concerning the playing time and positions of his child.  As a head coach, you have to tell parents that you are not going to let their kid pitch because he can’t throw a baseball within three feet of the strike zone, and you aren’t going to make every kid sit around and watch him walk ten batters in a row.  Or you have to tell another parent that you won’t let her son play first base because he is the shortest kid on the team, and he has difficulty catching baseballs.  The result is that you spend a season with a small group of resentful parents who sit through the games complaining about you.  It can get pretty unpleasant.

Head coaches get blamed when the team loses and praised when the team wins.  They have to make decisions about who plays and who doesn’t.  In high school, they have to decide who makes the team and who doesn’t and who gets to pitch and who doesn’t.  It involves making decisions that are often painful for kids and their parents, and you can make a lot of enemies.

There is much that is admirable about Walz’s military service and his contributions as an assistant coach.  The problem is that his embellishment of his role is done to suggest a level of leadership and courage under fire that he hasn’t earned.  Walz is perfectly happy to be described as “coach,” leaving the impression that he is the gruff old guy who is willing to make the hard calls essential for leadership.  Walz is not that guy.  During the days following the death of George Floyd, he dithered about applying sufficient force to stop the violence.  He could have called in the National Guard immediately and greatly limited the damage, but it would have required standing up to an angry mob encouraged by too many politicians and too many members of the media.

Kamala Harris also has her moments of embellishment.  In the 2019 Democrat presidential primary debate, she told a tale of her heroic role in integrating the Berkeley public schools.  During her convention speech, Oprah compared Kamala getting bussed to school as a little girl in Berkeley, California to the courage showed by several small children who were the first black students to integrate a school in Louisiana.  This is nonsense.  Berkeley was the most liberal city in America.  Its schools were never segregated.  The schoolchildren, both black and white, were bussed away from their neighborhood schools to achieve a greater amount of racial balancing, a policy that was probably more about income balancing than racial integration.  In truth, the schools, including the teachers and the students, welcomed the change.

To be sure, some parents would have preferred to have their children walk a couple blocks to their neighborhood school rather than have to sit on a school bus for a half-hour going to and from a faraway school.  But comparing Berkeley’s response to bussing to the Southern resistance to school integration is absurd.  When Kamala said in the debate, “That little school girl was me,” she was ascribing to herself a heroic role similar to the first schoolchildren integrating schools in the Deep South.

Compare her situation with that of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, one of the first nine teenagers to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957.  According to Wikipedia,

On September 4, 1957, Eckford and eight other African American students (known as the Little Rock Nine) made an unsuccessful attempt to enter Little Rock Central High School, which had been segregated. An angry mob of about 400 surrounded the school that day, with the complicity of the Arkansas National Guard.

Fifteen-year-old Eckford tried to enter the school, while soldiers of the National Guard, under orders from Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, stepped in her way to prevent her from entering. Eventually, she gave up and tried to flee to a bus stop through the mob of segregationists who surrounded and threatened to lynch her. Once Eckford got to the bus stop, she couldn’t stop crying. A reporter, Benjamin Fine, having in mind his own 15-year-old daughter, sat down next to Eckford. He tried to comfort her and told her, “don’t let them see you cry.” Soon, she was also protected by a white woman named Grace Lorch who escorted her onto a city bus.

That is what valor looks like.  For Kamala Harris to suggest that her experience was similar to Elizabeth Eckford’s is the definition of stolen valor.

Harris and Walz have espoused extreme positions on important issues, and these need to be fully vetted for their views.  But what also must be exposed is what these two poseurs at the top of the Democrat ticket really are.  They are phonies.  That is something everyone understands.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.