I am not a big sports fan (I know, you are all shocked), but do you know what I love? I love an uplifting sports movie with a solid training montage, preferably involving a rag-tag group of misfits and a coach who helps them learn to love themselves and the game, which generally results in them defeating their bullies and winning the big championship in the end. Will I have any idea what any of them are doing? Absolutely not. Will I go through an entire box of tissues? I absolutely will.
Tim Walz is basically a walking uplifting sports movie, so most people would not be too surprised to hear that when he had a kid on his football team who was struggling with alcohol and crime, Walz tried to help him by pushing him to focus on sports instead.
But only the gang at Fox News would try to frame that as a bad thing.
Just look at all those “allegedlys”! This almost sounds worse than the time they found out he had a girlfriend while he was living in China in his 20s, and that they had a bad breakup. You know, because it’s very unusual to have a bad breakup in your 20s. Heck, it sounds even worse than the time he arranged for there to be free tampons in school bathrooms!
The tweet for the article looks pretty ominous as well.
So villain-y!
According to the article, sourced from a very nice profile of the men Walz coached at Mankato West published in The Ringer, former high school football player Dan Clement got into crime and became an alcoholic as a teenager and Walz pushed him to keep playing football. Imagine!
Via Fox:
Clement said Walz repeatedly approached him in the hallways that year and told the teenager, “We need you.”
“He knew I was struggling,” Clement told the outlet, adding that Walz told him, “I don’t care about that other stuff.”
Clement said, after Walz's intervention, that he eventually returned to the team for the second half of the season.
However, Clement said he did not get sober until a full decade after Walz pushed him to return to the field for his final season, The Ringer reported. Still, Clement thanked Walz for his impact on his life.
“The caring attention he gave, that positive support can pull you through really dark times in your life,” Clement said, adding that he told Walz, ‘I’m leaning on you. I’m trusting you here. I think partying is a better idea. You don’t think so. And I’m going to trust you on that.’
“And he was right. I was wrong. And later in life, when I continued to do that, when I continued to trust other people who love me, then it led my life in this beautiful direction. Just like it did back then.”
Oh … the horror? I guess the bad part is that he pushed the kid to do something productive instead of drink or do crime and he still drank for ten years after that, so Tim Walz is a ginormous failure?
The rest of the article, unsurprisingly, simply lists many of Tim Walz’s other scandals, such as calling himself coach when he was only the assistant coach, and the recent time he went to a football game and someone who was not a fan yelled “Get out of here!” at him. Just shocking.
Meanwhile, there are some newly released Jeffrey Epstein recordings in which Epstein discusses his friendship with Donald Trump, in case you wanted to compare scandals.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Do not under any circumstances read the comments on the Fox News article.
"DEMONcRATS love to break the RULES and the LAWS. Anything to WIN!"
Sigh.
I stopped at my mailbox which serves everyone on our street. An attractive older woman exchanged eye contact as I grabbed my mail. She asked me "are you the fireman?" I replied "yes, but technically I'm a fire marshal." She smiled and said "I like your red car - it makes us safe." JFK I was blown away by that. I replied with a simple "thanks for making my week. Have you voted?" She said, "yes, it was Kamala and Tim."
Reminder to Texans: today is the last day Early Voting. Get your shit together and do it.