{"id":54181,"date":"2014-07-26T09:35:44","date_gmt":"2014-07-26T13:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=54181"},"modified":"2014-07-26T09:35:44","modified_gmt":"2014-07-26T13:35:44","slug":"more-walsh-bs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=54181","title":{"rendered":"More Walsh BS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Montana Senator John Walsh continues to lean on public sympathy for soldiers as an excuse for his plagiarizing his thesis at the Army War college. In an interview with <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/exclusive--sen--john-walsh-responds-to-revelations-that-he-plagiarized-army-war-college-paper-215332245.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory\">Yahoo News<\/a>, he says that he tripped one night during an exchange of gunfire in his FOB and hit his face on something, so there, see. He&#8217;s a war hero who tripped over a cable or something and he was wounded in combat. Doubters.<\/p>\n<p>And he went to the VA for PTS;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cI met with VA doctors, came back, went to the VA hospital here for a process period,\u201d Walsh said when pressed on whether he had been formally diagnosed with PTSD. \u201cWhen I came back, I had private insurance, I went to my personal physician in Helena, Montana and talked about what I was dealing with. He prescribed medication for me. \u2026He said there were symptoms of PTSD.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A Walsh aide told Yahoo News that the doctor prescribed Paxil, an antidepressant commonly used to treat PTSD.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s a bit convoluted. If you take that statement literally and chronologically, he&#8217;s saying that he saw VA doctors in Iraq &#8211; there are no VA doctors in Iraq, not now or ever. I still want to see his medical records since he made his PTS an issue, he has a responsibility to prove to veterans that he was actually diagnosed with PTS. I doubt that he was &#8211; I also doubt that he went to the VA for PTS. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/video\/exclusive-sen-john-walsh-responds-211044638.html?format=embed\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" mozallowfullscreen=\"true\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"true\" allowtransparency=\"true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/2014\/07\/26\/john-walsh-thesis-scandal-veterans-have-mixed-views-on-ptsd-excuse\/?intcmp=latestnews\">Fox News<\/a> reports that Montana veterans have a mixed opinion on Walsh&#8217;s initial response in regards to his theft of intellectual property;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But his initial statement riled some Montana veterans and elicited strong opinions, even if they didn&#8217;t have a full grasp on the circumstances.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the reason he cheated on a test? Give me a break. That&#8217;s the limpest damn excuse I ever heard in my life. I don&#8217;t buy that at all,&#8221; Navy veteran Don Malsam said in a telephone interview from American Legion Post 4 in Billings.<\/p>\n<p>Malsam acknowledged he was not a Walsh supporter even before the plagiarism allegations, but was adamant that they will seal Walsh&#8217;s fate.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think he&#8217;s done,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Roy Savage, the adjutant at the Ole Beck Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 209 in Missoula, said it shouldn&#8217;t. Savage, who also advocates for veterans and coordinates the Heroes Therapeutic Outreach Program, said the issue shouldn&#8217;t overshadow what each candidate stands and fights for.<\/p>\n<p>And even if Walsh did plagiarize his paper, Savage asked, so what?<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If he did it, you know, slap on the wrist,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Who hasn&#8217;t done it? I did it myself when I was in college and I was dealing with PTSD. Anybody who says they haven&#8217;t done it is a liar.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yeah, well, you&#8217;re a thief, too Roy Savage. I never stole someone else&#8217;s words and called it my own. Wanna call me a liar to my face? <\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, our buddy, Alex Horton, discusses in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/checkpoint\/wp\/2014\/07\/25\/opinion-sen-john-walsh-citing-ptsd-in-defense-of-plagiarism-hurts-veterans\/\">Washington Post<\/a> why it&#8217;s a big deal for veterans;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There are already erroneous cultural assumptions about what PTSD is and is not. The media sold the condition as the catalyst of the recent Ft. Hood shootings. It\u2019s also at the center of a case of an Iraq veteran who engaged in a shootout with police. PTSD is a purported explanation of violence when military training and wartime trauma begin to intersect.<\/p>\n<p>Walsh\u2019s claim carries a more abstract association. He told the AP he was on medication and struggling to cope. Those factors, he explains, led to unscrupulous behavior.<\/p>\n<p>That reasoning may help a senator but hurt other veterans. Folks going from the battlefield to the office must already contend with hiring managers who worry war veterans damaged by PTSD can be a physical threat in the workplace. Piling on to this problem will only negatively affect the reintegration of thousands of veterans who are coming home after Walsh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>While Walsh sees the PTS excuse as a convenient way to extricate himself from the controversy during a particularly tough election campaign, the long term damage to the veterans that Walsh led in combat is more difficult for the country, as a while to deal with. The media simply excuses all bad behavior from some veterans with PTS explanation because the malady is so misunderstood &#8211; and Walsh does nothing to unmuddy the waters. That&#8217;s why he needs to prove to all of us, veterans, media, employers, that he was ever treated for PTS. he&#8217;s the only person who can prove it and he should be doing that sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Montana Senator John Walsh continues to lean on public sympathy for soldiers as an excuse for &hellip; <a title=\"More Walsh BS\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=54181\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">More Walsh BS<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-veterans-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}