If I ever told my mom a whopper, then tried to tell her I’d just “misspoken,” she’d have…actually, I probably can’t say what she’d have done. But suffice it to say, it wouldn’t have gone well for me.
But apparently, when you’re a Democrat running for vice president, you can tell all the bit fat ones you want and the media will just pass it off as a mere slip-of-the-tongue. Albeit, perhaps a slightly inconvenient one.
“Tim Walz has a tendency to misspeak. It may haunt the campaign,” Politico said in a much-maligned post on X Thursday.
By “misspeak,” the outlet is referring to the Minnesota governor openly lying for years about his retired military rank, claiming that he carried a guy in a combat zone when he only ever served overseas in a support role from a safe distance, claiming he and his wife used IVF to conceive their children when they didn’t, and saying he was in China during the infamous Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 when, in fact, he didn’t actually arrive in the country until months later.
When asked how he explains lying about having been in China during the protests when he wasn’t, Walz said during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate that he’s just a “knucklehead” who can “get caught up in the rhetoric” and simply “misspoke.”
“I’ve not been perfect,” Walz said. “I got there that summer and misspoke.”
I guess he simply “misspoke” all those times he falsely called himself a retired Command Sergeant Major (he isn’t) and even listed it on his congressional bio and the Minnesota governor’s website.
But despite just calling them “lies” like they are, Politico bent over backwards to label Walz’s “misspeaks” everything but. In fact, terms the outlet used to describe the many, many falsehoods Walz has peddled over the years and during the campaign include “inaccurate statements,” “embellishments,” “verbal errors,” “misstatements.” In fact, the only time Politico ever uses the word “lie,” or a tense variant of it, is when accusing Republicans - including Donald Trump JD Vance - of doing it.
But don’t worry - Politico talked to a Democratic strategist who says it doesn’t really matter when Walz lies anyway, because the voters don’t really care about it.
“Any time you are forced to go off message is never welcome,” said Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. “But in the end, voters are looking for somebody who is more concerned about what these candidates are going to do to improve their lives than, ‘Did he get every single fact correct?’”
So go ahead - lie your face off. The media will just cover for you anyway.