I’ve been waiting to pull the trigger on this post for a while, but the more I’ve seen of Walz since Kamala Harris made the mistake of nominating him as her running mate, the more I’ve realized it needs to be said.

Tim Walz and John Bel Edwards are the same damn thing, once you control for the fact they come from very different places.

Obviously, Louisiana and Minnesota are on opposite ends of the Mississippi River and that distance is reflected in the politics of the two states. This is a red state, at least culturally (we’re not very good at governing ourselves according to red-state principles and our economic profile isn’t what you’d expect out of a red state), while Minnesota is every bit the loony-left hellhole New York and California are.

Interestingly, though, the numbers in Minnesota aren’t like the numbers in California. Minnesota has somewhere between 45 and 48 percent of its electorate who’ll vote Republican. They just don’t seem to generate a suitable bench of GOP politicians who can either turn out their voters in massive numbers or pick up votes across the aisle.

That’s a little like how it felt in Louisiana during the 2015 and 2019 elections, but of course the difference was that Louisiana was nonetheless a Republican state and the inability to get Edwards away from the governor’s mansion was an anomaly. In Minnesota, Republicans falling short in practically every race is the way things work.

And because of that, Democrat politicians in Minnesota can, and do, fly their far-left freak flag.

Keep that in mind as we go through this.

What is the signature value proposition for both Walz and Edwards? It’s their military background, of course.

In Walz’ case that’s gotten him in trouble, because people have noticed the fact he’s run around claiming to have “wielded weapons in war,” when in fact he did no such thing. That’s made worse by the fact that Walz, after spending more than two decades as a National Guard weekend warrior, re-upped as a Command Sergeant Major knowing that we were at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan and also knowing that his National Guard unit was in a rotation that would almost certainly result in a deployment, and rather than stick out a six-year commitment he ejected and retired with a busted-down rank rather than lead in combat.

So Walz got 20 years’ worth of supplemental pay while he was a teacher and a coach (it turns out he lied about how far he got as a coach, which isn’t much of a surprise) out of the National Guard, and now he’s got a persona as a military hero or something that he can trade on in politics. But when it came time to actually put down his chips as a soldier? Tim Walz said “No thanks.”

Edwards never really had a problem like Walz did around the Stolen Valor issue, but there’s something very similar between his military story and Walz’. Namely, that in both cases you’re looking at people who got everything they could out of the military but didn’t really give much back.

In Edwards’ case he went to West Point – something he traded on as though it made him into a sort of political saint where it came to Louisiana’s media and how they covered him – and then he fulfilled his four-year military commitment which paid off his tuition. As soon as that was over, he ejected out of the army and went to LSU Law School to learn how to sue people. But when Edwards got into politics, you’d have thought he was Chesty Puller or Audie Murphy or something. He embraced practically every idiotic nostrum of the Left but you sure couldn’t call him on any of it because He Went To West Point.

And when Eddie Rispone tried to punch through that veil by noting that Edwards’ truncated military career shouldn’t protect him from scrutiny, Rispone was castigated as a villain.

It’s nice to see that this same strategy isn’t working to protect Walz, but of course his circumstances – and the opposition – are different than those of Edwards.

Either way, both are good examples of how leftist Democrats are more than willing to use military service as a fig leaf over their radical politics. Edwards and Walz are very much alike in that regard.