On Monday morning, the Republican chairs of three House committees released a nearly 300-page report detailing what they alleged were impeachable offenses committed by President Joe Biden. Hours later, one of them \u2014 House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) \u2014 joined Fox News host Jesse Watters\u2019s prime-time program to discuss a critical question about Democratic leadership:<\/p>\n
Was Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) maybe somehow groomed or compromised by the Chinese government when he taught there in the 1980s?<\/p>\n
That Comer\u2019s appearance didn\u2019t address the impeachment probe that he\u2019d had a central role in advancing wasn\u2019t really surprising. The probe was a dud, centered on overheated or unsubstantiated claims that Comer and others had been peddling on Fox News for more than a year. It\u2019s probably true that Fox News\u2019s disinterest in the subject was related primarily to Biden\u2019s decision not to seek reelection, clearing the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic Party\u2019s nominee and to select Walz as her running mate. It\u2019s probably true, too, that even Fox News knows when it\u2019s got a nothingburger on its hands.<\/p>\n
So, instead, Watters hosted Comer to discuss another new freewheeling, unconstrained effort to dig up dirt on a Democratic elected official: House Oversight\u2019s probe, announced last week, aimed at Walz\u2019s purported \u201clongstanding connections to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entities and officials.\u2019 Those connections, the Oversight announcement explains, center on Walz\u2019s time teaching in China (for one year) and his creating an organization that brought American students on educational trips to the country.<\/p>\n
Watters, being Watters, characterized all of this in the most exaggerated possible terms, picking out isolated quotes to present a picture of someone \u2014 \u201cTiananmen Tim,\u201d he called him \u2014 in China\u2019s thrall. That Walz was enlisted in the National Guard at the time was presented as particularly suspect.<\/p>\n
Enter Comer.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very concerning that the FBI, to my knowledge, has never even investigated this,\u201d Comer began. \u201cNow, we\u2019re still trying to determine what extent they have \u2014 as far as all the trips this high-level official from the United States government \u2014 even before that, in the military \u2014 made to China.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, when Walz traveled to China in 1989 as part of an international teaching program run by a non-profit organization, he was not a \u201chigh-level official\u201d in the government or even in the military. Nor, at that time, was the Chinese surveillance state as sophisticated as it would later become. This is what a movie critic might call a \u201cretcon,\u201d an effort to refit new facts to offer an alternative explanation of past events.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a guy that really has embraced China\u2019s view of the world, the Chinese ideology, which is communism,\u201d Comer continued. His evidence for this? That Walz has government pensions instead of owning private-sector stocks. \u201cThis guy is very dependent on the government,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I believe he thinks that China, the business model that China\u2019s had, might be the ideal model for the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is silly. Foreign Policy\u2019s Paul Musgrave examined Walz\u2019s approach to China both before and after being elected to Congress in 2006.<\/p>\n
\u201cWalz\u2019s record is that of a measured critic of the Chinese Communist Party \u2014 prone neither to exaggeration nor accommodation,\u2019 Musgrave wrote. \u2018Nor is this a pose cooked up by spin doctors in the past few weeks. Small-town Nebraska newspaper articles \u2014 published well before Walz had any political ambitions \u2014 demonstrate that his professed affection for the Chinese people and culture has been matched by a longstanding criticism of the country\u2019s rulers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Introducing Comer, though, Watters suggested that perhaps Walz was \u201ctargeted or recruited for CCP influence operations.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very possible that China would be grooming an up-and-coming rising star in the political process,\u201d Comer said later in the discussion, \u2018to try to have a foothold in our government.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, during the time when Walz was teaching in China (the late 1980s) and leading school trips to China (beginning in the mid-1990s), he was not an \u201cup-and-coming rising star.\u201d He was a teacher who also served in the National Guard. Later, closer to his election to the House, Walz was also a visiting fellow at the Macao Polytechnic University. (It\u2019s not clear how much travel this entailed.) But if China\u2019s goal was to have an ally in U.S. government and somehow foresaw that Walz would fit that bill, they were probably disappointed in his tenure in the House. While there, the Minnesota representative took public positions critical of China\u2019s approach to human rights.<\/p>\n
By elevating the Watters-Comer discussion, we certainly run the risk of treating something fundamentally unserious as worthy of serious consideration. But that the discussion was so unserious is useful to consider in its own right, reinforcing that a primetime Fox News host and the head of a congressional investigatory committee are happy to engage in electorally focused conspiracy theorizing without any evidence of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
Very similarly to the impeachment probe that Comer had, to almost no fanfare, wrapped up a few hours previously.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
On Monday morning, the Republican chairs of three House committees released a nearly 300-page report detailing what they alleged were impeachable offenses committed by President Joe Biden. Hours later, one of them \u2014 House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) \u2014 joined Fox News host Jesse Watters\u2019s prime-time program to discuss a critical question about Democratic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8196,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}