The Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s selection for vice-president is one James David Vance. He is JD, for short. I suppose since he has a JD degree (juris doctor, doctor of laws), this common form of initial name should have a special significance. 

Vance has decided that it is a good idea to throw shade on Harris’s choice for vice president, Tim Walz, because Walz quit the National Guard after 24 years of service just before his unit was deployed to Iraq, implying that he chickened out (“stolen valor”)! Well, this is rich coming from a guy whose future boss chickened out of military service during the Vietnam War because of college deferments and later on the account of a claim of bon spur in his (undetermined) foot. 

This is not the first time I have heard of bone spurs getting in the way of doing physical things. The late Theodore Lyman Eliot, Jr. (1928-2019), the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy (1978-1985) and a one of the last truly gentlemen American diplomats, once came off the tennis courts in pain confessing that he should stop playing his favorite sport on the account of his bone spur. I do not see Trump having any problem playing tennis or golf and, for the record, there is no disclosed evidence of Trump ever having had spur surgery either! But I digress.

On his own account, Vance claims that like many of the post-9/11 patriotic Americans he joined the Marines for the love of country. Many may have done so, but for the televised interview that he gave around the publication of his book Hillbilly Elegy (broadcast on C-Span Book TV) we might believe his self-serving professed motivation to join the military. As it tuned out, according to his own words -  https://www.c-span.org/video/?432540-13/hillbilly-elegy - he enlisted in the Marines because he was at a dead-end after high school and unable to go to college and so, on the say-so of some friends and relatives, he went to the military as a way to get out of his rut and benefit later from the G.I. bill so he could go to college free. As it turned out, he went to Iraq as a military journalist. https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/elections-verify/jd-vance-marines-military-service-record-fact-check/536-b3bfb88b-bdb3-4a48-82e1-4c7ebdd05c03.  So, he might have seen combat, but did he really see combat, if get my drift.  

Vance is fond of fawning over “family” and how important it is that women have children instead of cats (implication: bare foot and pregnant, stay home mom-ing). So, if at the time of his enlistment in the Marines Vance were married with children and his wife worked and he had a comfortable good-paying job and he happened to have been in the National Guard with impeding rumors that he was about to be deployed overseas again (like Walz and his unit were once before) would Vance have not decided to sit this want out for the sake of the wife and children needing him at home?

Now, there is a story surfacing about Walz’s DUI arrest some time in the 1990s. https://apnews.com/article/tim-walz-drunken-driving-arrest-kamala-harris-b2ffe73963e0dbf9c804697e2831753e . Like karma, opposition research is a bitch and it can bite both ways! It was not long ago when the indiscretion of a certain Republican presidential aspirant was dismissed as youthful idiocy: George W. Bush admitted to using drugs in the 1970s,  https://iowastatedaily.com/213066/uncategorized/youthful-indiscretions-create-problems-in-politics-prisons/, and he was arrested once for drunk driving too https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2000/11/12/youthful-indiscretion-follows-into-adulthood/. 

George Bush went on to serve as a two-term president. If the past is epilogue, then we have two terms of Walz as vice president to look forward to.