Crazy Opinions about Tim Walz

This stuff gives the word “opinion” a bad name

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped by author)

This morning’s YouGov survey asked about Tim Walz, who is now on the Democratic ticket for Vice President. Here’s the first question in the survey:

Screencapture from the YouGov survey

Note that, when I completed the survey, only 16 percent of all the respondents were “very familiar” with Walz. The rest — 84 percent — were not qualified to conclude much about him.

However, look at the next screenshot, and you’ll see that 40 percent of the respondents scrambled to the conclusion that Walz is a “dangerous liberal and an extremist.”

Screencapture from the YouGov survey

Why does a person who doesn’t know enough to have an educated opinion select any option other than “Not Sure”?

Such is the state of MAGA today. If you’re a Moronic Angry Grim American today, you have no opinions of your own. All you have are the … can I even call them opinions? … of a “horrible” and “nasty” would-be dictator.

YouGov allows people to enter comments about each daily survey. Comments are in two lists, one by people who agree with you, and the other by people who disagree. I went to the disagree (and disagreeable) list and copied the first five comments:

Waltz allowed riots where businesses lost their business. He allowed rioters to burn down the city!!

Can I say it is moronic to misspell the name of a person you are supposed to know enough about to have an opinion?

Beyond that: True, there were riots in the Twin Cities in Minnesota after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer who is now serving life in prison. But false: Walz did not allow rioters to “burn down the city.”

A five-mile stretch of Lake Street in south Minneapolis was the hardest hit. I don’t want to make light of business owners watching remotely as their buildings and equipment were looted or smashed, but even in that five miles, most of the buildings were not “burned down.”

Besides, in the first day or so after the riots began, Walz wasn’t even in charge. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other local officials were. Walz took over only when the local officials couldn’t handle the situation and sent him the required official request for help. That arrived in the evening, the first day that the mostly peaceful protests turned violent. By the next afternoon, Walz signed an executive order authorizing National Guard deployments. Over the next several days, there was confusion as to where the Guard should be deployed, outside agitators showed up, the chaos worsened, and you know the rest.

Trying to be kind to this commenter who cannot even spell Walz, I searched for something that might have convinced them to post a falsity. I found it on X. You can see who posted it.

False information downloaded from X

‘Nuff said. Next comment:

Walz gave boys tampons in their bathrooms. Laughed and watched as his state burned. Retired and left his unit to dry when they deployed.”

Tampons in boys’ bathrooms? At first, I was scratching my head. Then, I realized that there are transgender students in Minnesota schools, whether or not this commenter approves of inclusivity, and I started nodding my head. I remember once bleeding through my skirt; it was embarrassing and I wouldn’t wish for that to happen to anybody.

Laughed and watched as his state burned? Oh, please, let’s at least be truthful.

Retired and left his unit to dry when they deployed? Walz served in the military for 24 years, first in Nebraska and then in Minnesota, sustaining hearing loss and acquiring tinnitus in both ears after having worked with heavy artillery. Surgery “partially” resolved the hearing loss but did nothing for the tinnitus.

I know surgery can’t fix tinnitus because I have it, too. It’s annoying, but it doesn’t stop me from carrying on with my life and shouldn’t stop Walz from fulfilling his role as VP. Partial hearing loss, corrected surgically, shouldn’t stop him, either, since most men his age can’t hear as well as they once could.

Walz did retire from the Minnesota National Guard shortly before his unit deployed to Iraq. I am glad he did not deploy with his unit. He would have been almost useless after sustaining additional hearing loss and even louder or more shrill tinnitus (yes, you can be both hard of hearing and have terrible tinnitus).

Imagine Walz in battle with the wall of sound you remember from Saving Private Ryan and having to ask his field commander to repeat those orders, please.

Third comment:

He’s too liberal — our borders need to be closed until the mess at hand is under control. Too many violent offenders and potential danger to legal citizens.

As many of you reading this probably know, it was the “liberal” Democrats who tried to pass a bill to resolve many of the issues with immigration, and it was the conservative Republicans who voted against it. Having an issue to blame Democrats for was more important to their leader than resolving the issues with immigrants.

As you may also know, violent offenders against legal citizens are likely to be legal citizens themselves rather than immigrants.

You may know these things. This commenter does not. What has this person been watching on TV?

Next comment. Only two more to go:

Waltz wants illegals to have driver’s licenses to legitimize them to vote.

I don’t know who “Waltz” is or what he wants. I also don’t know what “Walz” wants. I can, however, surmise that he agreed with the voters in Minnesota who decided that undocumented immigrants should have driver’s licenses and got this on the ballot as an initiative, which was then passed by voters.

Minnesota voters got this initiative passed knowing that undocumented immigrants who could drive a car legally could not vote. What they could do, and are required to do, is get auto insurance. Not vote. Just get to and from work more easily and get auto insurance to protect them, and you, in case of an accident.

In the nineteen U.S. states where undocumented immigrants are allowed to get driver’s licenses, not one also allows the holders of these driver’s licenses to board an airplane, enter a federal facility, or vote. Every one of them has governmental processes in place to prevent the undocumented from voting.

Whoever said they could vote? Oh, yeah.

The last comment, I promise:

He is a communist!! He lived in China for 10 years!!

Wow! China sure is powerful. Walz lived in Nebraska for 32 years and in Minnesota for 24 years. He lived in China for only 10 years. But China made him a communist.

Oh, no. It was one year plus about 30 visits over the years. He’s also visited India and Italy, among other countries.

Oh, wait. China couldn’t make anybody communist. China isn’t communist. The ruling Chinese political party is called the Chinese Communist Party, true, but that’s a holdover from Mao Zedong’s time. Both the Party and the Chinese government state that China is a socialist democracy, but it’s complicated. If you asked Xi Jinping what he rules over, he would likely tell you it’s a whole-process people’s democracy, which is also complicated but is defined as a state where political decision-making can be judged by “how well the government is able to improve the socio-economic lives of citizens.” Other people call China a neo-authoritarian state or a dictatorship.

People who call China a communist state are mostly people who don’t know what communism is. Or they are people who want to use the term, for example, to malign people who’ve been to China. Even if they’re critical of its government, as Walz is.

I read past the five comments I’ve included in this article, stopping when I got worn out by repetition. Not one of the comments was anything other than name-calling, and not one actual opinion was expressed.

Which begs the question: What is an opinion? I’m going to take a stab at this:

An opinion is not:

He said something “horrible” and “nasty,” Fox News said it, too. So, I say it now, over and over, horrible, nasty, and loud. And I’m right!

Instead, an opinion is (I’m going to take a stab at this):

The expression of a considered judgment based on facts as determined by evidence from reliable sources

I stay alert to opinions that differ from mine. That’s my responsibility as a political writer. About Tim Walz for vice president, all I’ve heard as an argument against my resounding …

▂▃▅▇█▓▒░ 𝚈𝙴𝚂! ░▒▓█▇▅▃▂

… is some crazy name-calling.

Ⓒ Katharine Valentino 2024 ✉ *Get email when I publish*

A human, not an AI text generator, wrote this story. (More Info)