Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance and allies of his Democratic rival Tim Walz exchanged blows in Pittsburgh on Thursday over their respective candidates’ military policies and their respective military services.
Before an audience of veterans at a VFW lodge in Lower Burrell, Vance repeated his sustained attack on Walz’s previous statements about his military service.
Vance, who served four years in the Marines, including a stint as a military reporter in Iraq, said he honored Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard.
“This is not about belittling anyone’s service,” Vance said. “It’s about belittling dishonesty.”
Vance was referring to a 2018 statement in which Walz implied he had served in combat – a remark Democrats called an unintentional misstatement. Vance also criticized Walz for retiring several months before his unit deployed to Iraq in 2006.
Rolling Months before the operation, he stated on his website that he knew it could happen in the future. However, his unit was not officially informed about the mission until two months after Walz’s retirement.
Former Democratic Congressman Conor Lamb, who himself served as a Marine lawyer, defended Walz during a counter press conference on Thursday, saying Walz ran for Congress to protest the Iraq War.
“He played an important role in shedding light on some of the failings of that policy,” Lamb said.
Lamb compared Walz’s service to that of former President Donald Trump, who missed five trips during the Vietnam War because he had bone spurs in his foot. And Lamb said that although Walz had misspoken in 2018, “if you want to frame this campaign around who misspoke more often, we could pretty much settle the whole thing today.”
He noted that during a recent interview with Elon Musk, According to NPR, Trump made 162 mistakes.
Shortly before his appearance in Lower Burrell, Vance’s campaign confirmed that he and Walz had agreed to a debate on October 1. Vance said he wanted to have more debates with Walz because Democrats had not done enough spontaneous campaigning to prove to Harris that she was up to the task.
“She never stands before the American people without a script. She never speaks to voters without a teleprompter in their midst,” Vance said. “We should not trust this person to sit in a private room with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.”
Vance also criticized Harris for her role in the decision to leave Afghanistan, a move that ended in chaos and led to the deaths of 13 American soldiers. (Vance recalled that Thursday was the third anniversary of that event and held a moment of silence for the dead.)
“They tried to close the airport before they got everyone out, one of the most catastrophic mistakes in U.S. military history,” said Vance, who called it a “completely unnecessary mistake by Kamala Harris and a complete failure of leadership.”
At the time, Harris said she played a key role in helping President Joe Biden make the decision to withdraw.
Lamb criticized Vance for standing by Trump, who he said insulted military veterans like John McCain for being captured during the war. And Lamb said Vance has not passed a single bill in the Senate to support veterans. Two of the congressmen who spoke before Vance were also veterans, but Lamb said they both voted against it. the PACT Act, which expanded health care for veterans.
“The question in this election is not, ‘Who was GI Joe in the war?’ it’s, ‘Who is going to fight for the GI Bill?'” Lamb said. “What are you going to do for veterans tomorrow and next year and five years from now?”
Vance’s speech promoted a policy that Trump supports: Veterans Choice. Plan allows veterans in some cases to receive health care from a private providerDemocrats, including Walz and Lamb, said the measure was an attempt to lay the groundwork for privatization of the VA health care system.
During Trump’s inauguration in 2016, Lamb said, “Trump was sitting on the patio at Mar-A-Lago with some of his corporate friends, figuring out how they could loot the VA and sell it to the private sector.”
