Anatomy of a Smear: "Tampon Tim" to "Tiananmen Tim"

MAGA rolls out its latest unintentionally hilarious attack on Tim Walz.

Fox News screengrab

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By Liz Dye

House Oversight Chair Jamie Comer is still talking about impeaching President Biden. But his heart isn’t really into it anymore.

On Monday — conveniently timed to coincide with the start of the DNC — House Republicans finally tapped out on their four-year impeachment effort. Their 291-page report, claiming that “overwhelming evidence demonstrates that President Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich his family” landed, not with a thud, but almost inaudibly.

Even Fox News largely ignored it, mentioning it only six times during the day Monday (three of them coming in passing during news briefs on Fox & Friends), before it was memory-holed as the DNC began.

Comer, who managed to have two “smoking gun” witnesses indicted for lying to the FBI, admitted that he’s found no direct evidence of crimes. But still he invited the House of Representatives to impeach the president anyway based on nothing more than vibes.

Or not. Really, he doesn’t care.

How Comer and company learned to love Russian disinformation

With Biden out of the presidential race, Comer has moved on to a new target — Tim Walz, who last night was celebrated at the DNC as the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate. (Note from Aaron: Scroll down for some quick thoughts about Walz’s speech.)

What are the odds, huh?

Comer is trying to give Walz the Hunter Biden treatment by tarring him with conspiratorial insinuations of links to the Chinese Communist Party, but he has even less to work with than he did with the president’s son. Nonetheless, Comer got the ball rolling with a letter to FBI Director Chris Wray harrumphing that his committee is conducting “government-wide investigation into the CCP’s political warfare operations against America and the response from federal agencies.”

Then he went on to suggest that Walz is actually a Chinese spy.

It has come to the Committee’s attention that Governor Walz has longstanding connections to CCP-connected entities and officials that make him susceptible to the Party’s strategy of elite capture, which seeks to co-opt influential figures in elite political, cultural, and academic circles to influence the United States to the benefit of the communist regime and the detriment of Americans. Reporting about Governor Walz’s extensive engagement with CCP officials and entities while serving in public office raises questions about possible CCP influence in his decision-making as governor—and, should he be elected, as vice president.

Could the Democratic vice presidential nominee be a Manchurian candidate? Jamie Comer is just asking questions!

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The Fox Cinematic Universe’s latest plotline

In 1989, when he was all of 25-years-old, Walz spent a year teaching high school in China. He went on to lead many student trips to the country, something Comer and his fellow goons have tried to spin as nefarious.

Comer got some help spreading his latest innuendo campaign Monday evening from Fox News’s Jesse Watters.

“If an American goes to China 30 times in the ‘90s, they have surveillance footage of him,” Watters vamped.

“China thinks long term,” Comer agreed, affecting grave concern while invoking old-timey Orientalist stereotypes. “It’s very possible that China would be grooming an up-and-coming rising star in the political process to try to have a foothold in our government.”

How wise of the CCP to have noticed this high school teacher 35 years ago and intuited that he would one day be the vice president!

Desperate times: Trumpers launch Swiftboating 2.0

“When you look at Hunter Biden’s ties with Communist China, it was for money,” Comer went on. “It looks like Walz’s ties may be for ideology. And this is something that we should be concerned about.”

From Walz’s 24-year military service and his career as a school teacher Comer deduces that the governor harbors communist leanings.

“If you look at Walz’s background, if you look at his ideology and the things he talked about when he ran for attorney general and he ran for governor, this is a guy that really has embraced China’s view of the world,” he went on, despite the fact that Walz is not a lawyer and never ran for attorney general.

But that didn’t stop the intrepid congressman from denigrating a lifetime of public service and a modest bank account as red flags for Red China.

“We have a guy who’s never been in the private sector, he’s worked for the government his whole life, from looking at his financial background, it doesn’t look like he owns any stocks, his retirement’s in a government pension plan,” said Comer, who has held public office since 2001 when he was 28-years-old and will collect both state and federal pensions. “This guy’s very dependent on the government, and I believe he thinks that the business model that China’s had may be the ideal business model for the united states.” (Watch below.)

The usual suspects profess to be very disturbed.

“Tim Walz owes the American people an explanation about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China,” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio went even further, calling Walz “an example of how Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders” to “push for policies that allow China to steal our jobs & factories & flood America with drugs.”

Tim Walz's remarkably courageous stand for LGBT youth

In reality, Walz has been a steadfast critic of the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, while at the same time advocating for greater engagement with the Chinese people. He’s met with the Dalai Lama and accused the CCP of ethnic cleansing of minorities, including the Uyghurs.

“What I saw was not just modernization. I saw the cultural shift, or the culturacide, if you may,” then-Rep. Walz said at a 2009 congressional hearing on Human Rights and the Law in China.

Source: twitter

None of which is going to please the Chinese government or allow Beijing to “steal our jobs & factories & flood America with drugs.” But that will not stop the GOP from pretending the former football coach and National Guardsman, who retired and then re-enlisted after September 11, is a Chinese spy.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson purports to be very concerned that Walz was married on June 4, 1994 — AKA the first Saturday in June, approximately the most popular wedding date of the year.

“It’s very strange. He got married on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. He’s gone to China. He’s taught in China. He’s got deep connections to China,” a bleary-eyed Johnson brayed Monday morning, as Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, whose willingness to give airtime to Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani cost her network $787 million, nodded along enthusiastically. (Watch below.)

After a two weeks of pearl-clutching about JD Vance couch jokes and whining that “weird” is a slur, Republicans seamlessly shifted to photoshopping Gov. Walz’s head onto menstrual products and swiftboating his military career. Now “Tampon Tim” has morphed into “Tiananmen Tim,” with Republican leaders calling the Democratic vice presidential nominee a literal sleeper agent. Next week they’ll accuse him of being trans and crown him “Tutu Tim.” Or “Tiara Tim,” or “Tacky Tim,” or whatever ridiculous nickname comes after that.

So far, none of it has mattered. An AP-NORC poll out yesterday showed Walz with +11 favorability, which puts him a whopping 28 points ahead of Vance, who clocked in at a dire -17. Those numbers track with a new Blueprint poll finding that “Walz is currently the most popular member of either presidential ticket. Voters frequently associate him with the words ‘veteran’ ‘teacher’ ‘experienced’ and ‘friendly.’ While voters see him as liberal on most issues, crucially, voters perceive him as more moderate than JD Vance.”

MAGA’s attempts to smear a midwestern governor who hunts and coaches football and loves his family and tells dad jokes have gone nowhere. Turns out’s pretty hard to make fun of a decent guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

But if we keep going like this, they’ll have to call him something else.

Vice President Tim.

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Walz comes through

By Aaron Rupar

Look for Tim Walz’s aforementioned favorability numbers to bump up even further, because whew did he deliver during the biggest speech of his night on Wednesday. (You can scroll my full thread of highlights from DNC night 3 here or here if you don’t have a twitter account.)

Walz claims he never used a teleprompter before Kamala Harris selected him as her running mate. But you wouldn’t have guessed that from his DNC speech, which wove together his impressive biography and the forward-looking vision for the country he and Harris have been sketching so effectively on the campaign trail.

The best part came when Walz’s son Gus tearfully exclaimed “that’s my dad!” after Walz recognized him, his sister hope, and Walz’s wife Glen. You simply can’t fake moments like this. (Watch below.)

Between Oprah, Gus, the fantastic speeches on Tuesday from Michelle and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton getting a well-deserved moment of recognition on Monday, and the heartfelt embrace between Kamala Harris and President Biden following Biden’s speech, it’s been a remarkably emotional DNC — in a good way.

We’ll have coverage of Harris’s speech in tomorrow’s newsletter. What are your thoughts on the convention so far?

That’s it for today

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