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The Real Reason John Walsh Should be Defeated
As my fellow editor-to-the-stars, Jon Gabriel, noted earlier this week, Montana Democratic Senator John Walsh is in—to use the term of art—a mess of trouble. It looks likely that Walsh lifted large parts of his master’s thesis at the Army War College from outside sources, including an article in Foreign Affairs and Natan Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy. (Walsh hardly bothered to make even cosmetic changes to the text, leaving it a toss up whether he is more to be loathed for cheating or pitied for how bad he is at it).
I wasn’t particularly shocked by this story—not because it’s within the range of acceptable behavior, but because it seems so pedestrian by contemporary standards. These days, if your political scandal doesn’t feature a prostitute, a crack pipe, or some transcontinental gun-running it just seems like you’re not taking the job that seriously. If anything shocked me about Walsh’s story it’s that you can apparently get a master’s degree from the Army War College with a 14-page paper. In other words, Victor Davis Hanson could’ve knocked it out in the time it took you to get this point in the post—but the task apparently broke the iron ethical resolve of John Walsh.
What’s truly galling about this story is Walsh’s new “I’m not sayin’…I’m just sayin'” explanation. From USA Today:
Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., says he was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder when he used unattributed material in a research paper for his master’s degree.
The senator also said he was dealing with the suicide of a fellow veteran at the time he wrote his paper.
“I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor,” Walsh told the Associated Press in an interview. He talked to the AP after The New York Times published a report about the senator’s apparent plagiarism.
“My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment,” the senator told AP.
Let’s be honest: whatever this guy’s merits—even if he was a conservative Republican and we thought that losing his seat could cost us the upper chamber—he’d deserve to go down for this.
If you’ve ever been close to someone with PTSD, you know it’s utterly plausible that, if Walsh is accurately describing the state he was in at the time, he really may have been buckling under the stress. You also know, however, that PTSD is not demon possession. Walsh may have had a perfectly good rationale for trying to get his degree requirements delayed or even abandoning the program altogether; he doesn’t have a plausible explanation for a temporary psychosis that was conveniently proportionate to his ambition. That’s not PTSD; that’s standard-issue narcissism.
The real insult here is in the contrast. There are countless veterans with very real, very deep problems stemming from PTSD who would never imagine using it as an excuse for even the slightest misdeed. They have too much pride and too deep a sense of personal responsibility. For Walsh, however, it’s a flamboyant handicap — one that apparently keeps him from being a good student, but not a good US Senator.
Send him home, Montana.
Published in General
He’s pathetic, corrupt, and a poor liar.
He has unimpeachable credentials to be a Democratic Senator, in other words.
He looks forward to a long and lucrative career. Walsh in ’16?
My father was in more or less constant combat from June 9, 1944, when he landed on Omaha Beach, and October 5, 1944, when his tank was destroyed, a tank-mate was killed, another wounded, and my father’s shoulder and upper right arm were virtually destroyed by shrapnel. He underwent more than ten operations on his arm, then spent the next forty years running a farm with a crippled right arm (he was right handed). Thousands of others had it much worse than him.
Had PTSD existed back then, I’m quite certain he had it.
To the best of my knowledge (and the knowledge of his countless friends and family), he never cheated or lied. In fact, he never complained once in my presence about what happened to him.
When a guy like Senator Walsh uses PTSD as the excuse for lying and cheating (and that is precisely what plagiarism is) it is (1) disgusting (2) pathetic, and (3) dishonors those who wore the uniform honorably.
I trust the voters of Montana will send him home to reflect on his moral defects.
Aw man, I was so hoping you would go with the dead girl/live boy formulation that made Edwin Edwards so justifiably famous and beloved.
That was my first reaction on hearing the story. I had longer papers assigned in middle school.
At least he had the good taste to plagiarize Natan Sharansky.
Montana has had a bad track-record as of late with electing spectacular incompetents and straight-up doofuses to the senate and governor’s office. I’m thinking of clowns like Jon Tester and the recently-retired Brian Schweitzer. And now Walsh.
Knowing full well that editing an editor can be risky business, I still feel compelled to correct Troy’s term of art. The correct term would be … you in a heap of trouble, boy. That looks like some kind of racin’ car.
Just trying to help out.
I used to lecture every year at the Air War College, and I have spoken at the Naval War College and the Marine Corps University. From conversations over the years, I learned that the Army War College was regarded as the weakest of the lot. It is now clear that it has earned that reputation.
Usually, plagiarism is easy to spot. The quality and character of the writing differs from that found elsewhere in the plagiarist’s work. One need only Google a phrase and the source pops up. My guess is that at the Army War College they simply don’t give a damn.
His timing was a bit off. You have to wait to get elected to the Senate before you can get by having others write your papers.
PTSD make a person dishonest? I didn’t know that…
So let me get this straight … his defense is that he has a syndrome that causes him to become intellectually dishonest under pressure?
Fine Senate material …
But wait. Maybe this isn’t all his fault. After all, all of his fellow Democrat senators are now claiming that their failed gambit to squeeze states into setting up Obamacare exchanges, a gambit which they bragged about in videos, was really a “drafting error.” This from the same senators who assured us that no one is talking about reconciliation (right before they passed Obamacare by reconciliation).
[Insert hundreds of similar examples here.] (Cough – Joe Biden! – cough).
Democrat + Under pressure + Intellectual dishonesty.
Yeah. They’re definitely suffering from a syndrome, but I don’t think it has anything to do with the military.
Mr. Walsh is yet one more example of how America is suffering from a crisis of character. Plagiarism is too nice a word. The senator from Montana is a thief. Rob a liquor store at gunpoint and get five to ten. Rob another man’s mind and get elected to office.
I’m writing a letter to the editor on Walsh, Troy. But I’m feeling stressed so I’m just going to use this article and pass it off as my work. Okay? Like I said, I’m stressed.
Oops! I asked you permission. I won’t make that mistake again.
Yet another example of the unerring political acumen of our Chief Executive, to jump start this guy into the seat to give him the putative benefits of quasi-incumbency, without worrying about his character. I agree with Troy that his character flaw is revealed not in his cheating and bragging about a degree that he didn’t deserve, but in this pathetic excuse for his actions (instead of admitting his mistake). He cheapens the service not just of those who wear our uniform, but those who served alongside him in the Montana National Guard.
He is a laughingstock amongst History graduate students. I’m not sure what they are most appalled at…the plagiarism, the 14 page paper, or his shameful attempt to blame PTSD for his lack of honesty.
Send him home? In the modern Democratic party he’s clearly VPOTUS material.
Just ask “Slow Joe” Biden…..
Since I think we’ve covered pretty well the moral failings involved here, I wanted to jump in to make a somewhat separate point.
Any of the War Colleges shouldn’t be treated as a consolation prize or as a pit stop “check in the box” on the way up in the ranks. They are frequently treated precisely that way, and the standards applied not nearly rigorous enough.
Among the perversions resulting from the higher education situation in the US today has been the notion that a graduate degree should be necessary prior to, in my own service, for example, taking command of a ship–as though one had anything to do with the other.
There was also a time where making E-7 was contingent upon having earned a bachelors degree–which had the perverse effect of taking career subject matter experts and deck plate leaders away from their subjects and the deck plates to earn a degree. The net effect of this policy, coupled with doing away with Regional Maintenance Center billets for mid-career enlisted sailors (for cost savings) produced a knowledge and sustainability gap on our ships at sea that we’re only starting to recover from.
Graduate eduction has a place in our services, but this case is illustrative of a wider problem: a man who had to plagiarize a 14-page thesis to have anything whatever to say has no place attending a War College. Hardly the best and brightest.
If you accept his argument, he is too mentally unbalanced for high office. If you reject his argument, he is recklessly and faithlessly compounding his dishonesty to the point where he is unfit for high office barring his adoption or marriage into the Kennedy, Clinton, or Obama clans.
14 pages? Pathetic.
To be fair, it was probably double spaced and highlighted with very bold margins.