Tim Sheehy, the rich pretty-boy Republican with no electoral experience who’s running against Montana’s senior Senator, Jon Tester (D), has a bit of a truthiness problem, as the Washington Post reported over the weekend (gift link). Sheehy’s particular difficulty involves a bullet that’s embedded in his right forearm. A former Navy SEAL, Sheehy has told a number of inconsistent stories about the provenance of this bit of lead, most of them aimed at emphasizing that his experiences as a warrior prove that he should go straight from being a multimillionaire to being a US Senator. A couple for-instances from the Post story:
“I got thick skin — though it’s not thick enough. I have a bullet stuck in this arm still from Afghanistan,” Sheehy said in a video of a December campaign event posted on social media, pointing to his right forearm.
Inconsistent how, you might ask. Funny thing: Sheehy also told a US Park Ranger in 2015, after he’d left active duty but was still in the Reserves, that he’d accidentally shot himself in the arm while visiting Glacier National Park. He said that his Colt .45 revolver had, uh, slipped and fallen while he was loading his vehicle, and for discharging a firearm in a national park, he caught a federal citation and paid a $525 fine.
Oh, except now that the report of that incident has been found by journalists, Sheehy has another explanation! He never actually dropped his gun in the park, heavens no! Instead, he told the Post,
the statement he gave the ranger was a lie. He said he made up the story about the gun going off to protect himself and his former platoonmates from facing a potential military investigation into an old bullet wound that he said he got in Afghanistan in 2012. He said he did not know for certain whether the wound was the result of friendly fire or from enemy ammunition, and said he never reported the incident to his superiors.
Sheehy said he did not shoot himself in the park in 2015, but rather fell and hurt himself on a hike, necessitating a trip to an emergency room, where he said he told hospital staff he had a bullet in his arm, triggering his interview with the ranger.
Just to be clear, then, Sheehy is a lying liar either way. Either he lied for years about being wounded in combat because he actually took that bullet in a negligent discharge in peacetime, or he lied to a federal law enforcement officer to cover up an injury he suffered in Afghanistan because he was worried about repercussions for not reporting it.
If the latter is the case (the latter is not the case), then we’ve got a double lie, now don’t we? One of omission in 2012, and then another of commission when the bullet was spotted on his x-rays and reported by the hospital, as required by law. (Not what happened. And that we are actually having a conversation about whether the Ranger as well as ER staff could tell A BRAND NEW GUNSHOT WOUND FROM A YEARS OLD ONE IS KILLING THE EDITRIX RIGHT NOW, DONE, DEAD.)
Hello, tangled web what has been weaved when first Sheehy practiced to deceive.
Sheehy, who knows there’s a campaign benefit to having a combat wound instead of one from carelessness, insists he lied to the ranger for the purest of motives, you betcha, because you know how the woke military brass is when it comes to destroying patriotic warriors!
“I guess the only thing I’m guilty of is admitting to doing something I never did,” Sheehy said […]. He added of his platoonmates: “It was a small price to pay to make sure that a whole team of really great Americans didn’t get dragged through the mud over this.”
Oh, you see, he was afraid that if he reported his war wound in 2012, or even in 2015, he and his platoon would have been dragged through the mud, presumably by the Woke Pentagon Brass. He even told the Post that an example of being dragged through the mud could be seen in the case of Eddie Gallagher, persecuted and court-martialed in 2018 after several of his squadmates told military intelligence he was a psychotic rage monster who shot indiscriminately at civilians and allegedly murdered an injured Iraqi POW who needed killing anyway. Boys will be boys, so Donald Trump forgave Gallagher and two other accused or convicted patriotic war criminals.
But let’s not get too wrapped up in that one, since Sheehy would have had to be a psychic in 2012 to foresee Gallagher’s persecution for war crimes allegedly committed in 2017, long after Sheehy’s deployment. He’s just reminding us that patriots never get a fair shake, including brave vets who covered up their own injuries or maybe shot themselves accidentally years later. He’s a hero and a Navy Seal, did he mention that?
The Post found the ranger, who was surprised by Sheehy’s new account:
[T]he ranger said that Sheehy showed him the weapon that Sheehy said he had accidentally discharged. The ranger said he recalls that the firearm was in a holster in Sheehy’s vehicle, fully loaded except for one missing bullet.
Sheehy’s campaign didn’t buy that story. His attorney, Daniel Watkins, pointed out that the 2015 written report didn’t mention any missing bullet, so the ranger’s account to the Post had to be a “fabrication.”
Watkins also said Sheehy’s revolver couldn’t possibly discharge from being dropped, a contention backed up by Rick Vasquez, a BATF officer the Post contacted, who said it would be “very unlikely” for the gun to misfire that way.
The ranger said he’s a Marine veteran himself and that while he’s voted previously for Tester, his comments weren’t partisan, telling the Post, “It’s just the truth.” Well yeah, but you know how everyone is a partisan liar except Republicans who had to lie to police to keep their Navy SEAL buddies out of trouble, so it was OK.
Sheehy graciously explained that he doesn’t “in any way impugn the law enforcement officer,” because “Everything he says is true to the extent of his knowledge.”
Besides, Sheehy has told so many stories about how many times he was shot — while being a NAVY SEAL, don’t forget! — that you can forgive him for being fuzzy on the deets. Like, even as he wrote them down for a memoir:
In his book, he wrote that he was wounded numerous times and never reported many of his wounds because he did not want to get pulled off the battlefield or imperil a fellow service member’s record. […]
He wrote in one section of his book that he had multiple “bullet wounds.”
Later in the book, he wrote that there was only one time that “my body was actually hit by a bullet.”
In that episode, he said he’d been in fierce combat and only noticed he’d been shot after getting back to base, when he learned “there was a bullet in my arm! It’s still there today by the way.”
Elsewhere in the same book, he wrote that he was wounded by a “friendly ricochet bullet” but didn’t report it because he didn’t want to be sent home or cause trouble for the teammate who shot him, “a total stud who went on to a successful career as a SEAL.”
He explained to the Post that those were actually the same incident, silly. But also he was hit twice, but one shot was stopped by his body armor so it didn’t wound him, and also he didn’t know who accidentally shot him, really, so maybe it wasn’t the total stud but an Afghan baddie, or possibly it was Greedo, although we all know Han shot first.
What with Montana having gone far to the right in recent years, and money from the GOP and rightwing groups flooding the state, Sheehy nonetheless has a good shot (ha! ha!) at beating Jon Tester this fall. But Tester can at least have some fun holding up his left hand, which is missing three fingers, and pointing out that he’s never claimed that was due to anything other than a meat-grinder accident on his family’s farm when he was nine years old.
And don’t you dare go accusing Sheehy of stolen valor. He never got a Purple Heart for that bullet in his arm, however it got there, so he’s simply another patriotic Republican liar who will always lie when it’s for a good reason, the end.
OPEN THREAD!
[WaPo (gift link) / Photo: Tim Sheehy on Facebook]
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