Murray Walsh: On honor

By MURRAY WALSH

Aug. 17, 2026 – Two ongoing stories or “memes” as the young folks say, have caused me to muse on the subject of honor.  The first is the initiative by Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. of Petersburg to run for the US Senate seat now held by Dan S. Sullivan, COL, USMC (Ret.)   To avoid confusion, I will refer to the first mentioned Sullivan as Decoy Dan.

Decoy Dan claims that his campaign is legitimate and not a scheme to assist the campaign of Mary Peltola against Senator Dan.  The Division of Elections didn’t believe him – and there is pretty good evidence not to believe him – and I don’t believe him either.

Do you consider yourself to be a person of honor?  If you joined any branch of the military, you would have sworn an oath to be a person of honor.  Same with police departments and even the Boy Scouts.  I suppose you can un-swear an oath once you leave the organization but I think most people who commit to a life of honor feel good about doing so and stay with the program even after leaving the service they originally entered.  This is particularly true of US Marines.  “Once a Marine, always a Marine” they say.

I am using the word honor in the sense of personal conduct: that you will do the right thing even if nobody is looking; that you will return a lost wallet with all the money still in it; that you will tell the truth even if you could get away with a lie; and that you will not engage in a deceptive activity even if doing so is not illegal.

There is a minuscule chance that Decoy Dan really is a sincere and independent candidate.  But the overwhelming likelihood is that Mary Peltola and her entourage, in Petersburg two weeks before Decoy Dan announced his candidacy, encountered him, learned of his name and either talked him into this scheme or encouraged him if it was his idea.  He has certainly gotten support from other Democrat-leaning consultants and some pretty spendy lawyers.   But either way, the fact that DD is doing this at all is inherently dishonorable because it will cause voter confusion.

The second story, also now ongoing, is the Peltola campaign’s series of advertisements that attempt to tarnish Senator Sullivan’s character, and his honor, by suggesting that he used his position to enrich himself and was a scofflaw when it came to the Senate’s disclosure rules.

For the record, he never “hid” stock trades.  The stocks in question were managed by a third-party advisor and were not purchased by Sen. Sullivan.  Rather, they were acquired through inheritance and later sold without his knowledge.  He filed the required disclosure immediately upon learning of the sales.

This ad campaign also claims that Senator Dan’s “fortune” tripled in the last 12 years and that this is somehow indicative of misbehavior in Congress or inattention to duty.  It is neither.  All it really means is that Dan has a better equity manager than I do because my own “fortune” only grew by two and a half times over the last 12 years.

The Peltola ad campaign is actually cruel in its effort to attack Senator Dan’s character, and honor, because his honor is one of the most vivid and attractive things about him.  Ordinarily, you would expect Peltola, or any other challenger, to attack the things Dan has done for the state.  The problem there is that he has done uniformly good things.  He has also leveraged his position to undo a lot of really bad things that the Biden, Obama and Clinton administrations did to Alaska.

Honor is important to me, to Senator Dan, and I hope it is important to you, dear Reader, because without it, American society cannot function properly.  The fact that there are some people in politics that are willing to operate without honor makes it more important than ever, that the rest of us call out dishonorable behavior and not allow it to rule us, as it has done from time to time.

Walsh is a retired land use consultant living in Juneau since 1976.