Tammy Duckworth's Rival - NYTimes.com Joe Walsh is a freshman congressman from Illinois, a Tea Party Republican, who has a reputation for saying outrageous things very loudly. If you see the videos of him yelling at constituents and interviewers who dare to disagree with him, you may conclude that he is best ignored. But then he started attacking his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat who also happens to be a National Guard helicopter pilot who lost her legs and the use of her right arm when she was shot down in Iraq. "Female, wounded veteran ... ehhh," Mr. Walsh told Politico. She is nothing more than a handpicked Washington bureaucrat. Mr. Walsh could have dropped it there but didn't, and in recent videos can be seen mocking Ms. Duckworth and belittling her sacrifice again. "Now I'm running against a woman who, my God, that's all she talks about," he said in a town-hall meeting on July 1. Our true heroes, it's the last thing in the world they talk about. Mr. Walsh later said his point was simply that Ms. Duckworth has been avoiding the issues. But the fixation on his opponent's war record seems to be Mr. Walsh's problem, not hers. As for issues, there are several in Mr. Walsh's record that are worth discussing - like his being only the only member of the Illinois Congressional delegation to vote against this year's transportation bill, even though he represents a district, west and north of Chicago, that includes parts of O'Hare Airport and many of the city's and region's most important highway and railroad networks. Or that he has spent his time championing oddball bills that have gone nowhere - measures to abolish the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation, to forbid the use of the word "Palestine" in government documents and to support "Israel's right to annex Judea and Samaria." He is also sponsor of the Save Christmas Act. Ms. Duckworth has done far more than her share in serving her country. Against that record, Mr. Walsh's comments were deplorable.