The phrase ‘stop digging’ comes to mind. Just two days after indicating he may have plagiarized his master’s thesis due to post-traumatic stress disorder, now Montana Democrat U.S. Senator John Walsh said, “I am in no way, no way, tying what I did to any type of PTSD.”
Walsh made the comment during an interview with KMMS radio in Bozeman.
“That had nothing to do with the mistake that I made. … I may have said that, if that was the thought of that, that’s not at all in any way what I meant or said.”
As the Wall Street Journal points out:
That’s a change from what he said on Wednesday, hours after the New York Times broke the story that Mr. Walsh borrowed liberally from other sources for a 14-page paper at the Army War College. Mr. Walsh had said he was under a great deal of stress following the deaths of members of his military unit.
Unfortunately for Walsh, the more he tries to explain, the worse it seems to get. Add to that his avoiding the DC press and it’s difficult to see how he survives this.
“I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor,” he told the AP. “My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment.”
Besides the AP interview, Mr. Walsh has avoided Washington reporters since story broke. In the Friday interview, Mr. Walsh sought to compare the seriousness of the charges against him with the sorts of decisions he made in combat in Iraq.
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