Tim Walz Fumbles, Politico Hysterically Scrambles to Save Him
The media needs a course correction yesterday, but today is better than never. Maybe Politico should be more concerned with saving its own skin than Tim Walz’s.
Politico has decided to wade into the wild waters of the 2024 election with two utterly baffling defenses of Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
The first, presented immediately following the debate between Walz and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, attempted to decode the body language of the two candidates and explain how voters might have perceived the two men.
Many viewers saw the sweaty governor’s bulging eyes as a sign of nervousness or stress. No no, says Politico! According to them, that just shows his passion!
“Eye-popping can sometimes be a sign of surprise, but for Walz, it simply revealed his emotional intensity — like this moment during an exchange about abortion,” Politico explained, alongside an image of Walz’s bug eyes drilling into the viewer. “Early humans would have made such facial gestures to communicate strong emotions, like “danger is close.” For Walz, it gave extra weight to his feelings and held our gaze.”
Uh… what?
Walz wasn’t tapping into prehistoric energy to make his point, he’s just uncomfortable in front of a camera. In a bizarre attempt to cover up what was a weaker debate performance, all of a sudden we have to call in the body language expert.
While Walz got plaudits for his strange mannerisms, Vance was dinged for the heinous crime of, get this, having a beard.
“Research indicates that voters see beards as (surprise, surprise) more masculine,” Politico wrote. “That can be positive to some, reading as strength and competence. But to others, especially women, it can be negative, conveying aggression and opposition to feminist ideals.”
I’m sure the women watching the debate were deeply off-put by Vance’s facial hair, and not the goblin standing on the other side of the stage bugging his eyes out.
Politico wasn’t done carrying water for Walz with their body language expert, however.
A second article lamented Walz’s tendency to “mispeak” and how that might cause problems for the Harris campaign come November.
“Since being tapped as Kamala Harris’ running mate, the folksy, plain-speaking Minnesota governor has had to explain a growing number of inaccurate statements — and at times embellishments — about his past,” the article reads. “It’s unclear whether Walz’s verbal errors will undercut his credibility with voters. But the need to continually clean up those claims could politically hurt Walz and Harris, who are locked in a tight race with Donald Trump and JD Vance.”
Mispeak is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I think I would use the word “lie” instead. Politico sure as hell doesn’t think they’re lies, the only time the word “lie” appears in the above article refers to Trump and Vance’s policies.
It’s not misspeaking to say you “carried weapons of war” when you had a desk job in Italy. It’s just lying. It’s also a lie when you say you were in Hong Kong when the massacre at Tiananmen Square happened to paint yourself as some sort of expert on democracy when you weren’t there for another few months. And painting yourself as a moderate on abortion when you passed some of the most permissive laws in the country for the murder of innocent infants? Yeah, that’s a lie too.
These are not things that can be chalked up to misspeaking, especially when they’re used as a cudgel against your political opposition.
It must be really nice to be a Democrat and have mainstream media outlets debase and embarrass themselves in a pathetic attempt to prop you up. Thankfully, the American people are waking up to the reality that their media is another organ in the massive Democrat machine.
Recent polling has shown that Americans’ trust in the media is at record lows, and stunts like the ones Politico is trying to pull aren’t helping. I am a firm believer in the Fourth Estate as a check on the power of the state. But the Fourth Estate has to actually do its job and hold the state accountable, not just hand wave away the very real concerns of the citizenry.
Why would anyone trust the media, who for years pretended the corpse sitting in the Oval Office was “sharp as a tack,” to be honest about the most radical VP candidate we’ve seen in decades? Of course they wouldn’t. And that’s an issue.
The media needs a course correction yesterday, but today is better than never. Maybe Politico should be more concerned with saving its own skin than Tim Walz’s.