You’d lie too if you were a Politician.
“Although I did not serve in Vietnam….” —
That is, roughly, Richard Blumenthal’s rebuttal to the revelation on his career of Vietnam War Resume Enhancing — or, Lying. Surely he had his chances to clear up the media reports that followed his Vietnam Service line but chose not to. I gather this video demonstrates his awareness of the Looming Cloud — it may be a case of seeing things, but I detect this certain halting manner in his speech — he would go ahead and correct the record he allowed to fester in self-service.
Personally, this story strikes me as a Tempest in a Teapot. If at first blush my thought was, “Shouldn’t derail his political career, but should force him into a penance” — ie: the Democratic Party has until Friday to line up a new candidate before the Filing Day closes.  Blumenthal can run for something else in another election cycle, “Regain the Public Trust”.  Now I’m staring at it, and am generally unable to see why this deserves much of a fuss. But if it receives its fuss — Fuss it shall have. Filing Deadline ticks on in; throw this in as one item in your pile of assessments, but my gut tells me this story will likely fade even if John Cornyn hopes it can sustain itself to November.
A little ironically, the Washington Monthly blog berated the Republican Class of ’94 with a notation of Wes Cooley, whose political career brings us a more acute and severe case of that “Wannabe Veterans Disease” that inflicts Blumenthal.
Myself, I ignore a lot of political biography that politicians paint for us, and thus probably would have let his “Lessons I learned in Vietnam Service” fly right past me. I tend to detect a lot of bull-shitting in the words office-seekers throw out, so suggest that the record of political office-holding and campaign contributors (you know — who has bought the man?) be combed throw before learning about when you found Jesus or whatever. Sorting the meaning of people seeking high office with a mix of self-interested aggradizement and Public Service, whose lives are thrown out for Public consumption, with people in the public that demand to believe in certain peculiar things is sometimes a strange matter.   This morning, I heard the last quarter of an hour of the Bill Press Show. He was hob-nobbing and wringing his hands with Larry Sabato.  This is a man, Bill Press, who stood full-square in the Democratic Presidential Primary behind a Hillary Clinton who pulled out of whole cloth this bit about getting struck by Bosnian Snipers.  This matter may or may not have shown qualities not welcome in the role of President — a bad “fly by the seat of her pants” tendenc, but surely she is qualified for, say, “Secretary of State”. Meantime, there was this politically potent part of the electorate who came to believe rather bizarre things about the service of John Kerry after a campaign from the dishonest “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”, significantly throwing up that post-modern nature of politics where political attachments dictate what you want to believe.
For the record, I hadn’t much concern for George W Bush’s spotty war record — seemed worth a day of entertaining political theater and not much else– tells a story of Class, I suppose.