by Smitty (h/t Terry Cowgill at Big Media)
Giving Dick Blumenthal the benefit of the doubt, he probably didn’t wake up one morning and say to himself “I wonder if I could score some favor with the Veteran crowd by having them on about my service record. . .” while he was shaving.
In general, these kinds of mis-statements creep in over time, like fibs over how much you enjoy the mother-in-law’s recipe for pig’s feet. After enough embellishment and time, the effort level of saying “Hey, I’ve got to clear the air on a point about my service record” seems too expensive.
Until the whole pile goes from innocuous to noxious.
How to fix this mess? Terry shows how:
How could he, in his own words at yesterday’s press conference, “misspeak” about his service “on a few occasions” and the news media let him get away with it? Most of those “occasions,” by the way, were gatherings of veterans’ groups.
Part of the answer can be found on a segment on Morning Joe on MSNBC. Co-host Mika Brzezinski, who worked as a TV journalist in Connecticut for six years in the 1990s, let slip an admission many skeptical media observers in this state have suspected ever since Blumenthal replaced Joe Lieberman in the AG’s office: she likes Blumenthal. Indeed, Brzezinski made it sound as if she and her husband, fellow TV reporter James Hoffer, were friends of Dick.
“After I read the [New York Times] article, I felt crushed for him,” Brzezinski confessed. “Because my husband and I had known him as reporters in Connecticut for years and years.” Brzezinski added that Blumenthal “has done a lot of really good work.”
Why would Brzezinski feel “crushed” and not something more — such as “shocked” or “outraged?” Because it’s pretty clear that Brzezinski, like dozens of other reporters in the Nutmeg State, thought Blumenthal was a man of integrity, a latter-day judicial saint dedicated to the betterment of his fellow Nutmeggers.
A friend of mine, and Ted Kennedy fan, personally focused on all of Ted’s “good” statesmanship, as though it were some form of public penance for “that unfortunate submarine adventure”.
When you have an older, liberal friend like that, you don’t ask them how it feels to have just rationalized their way through capital punishment. But let’s not go all Lefty-no-proportionality here: I’m not arguing that deceitful speech about past military service is tantamount to murder. What I am arguing is that, rather than note how a demonstrated looseness with facts might be merely the tip of a noteworthy iceberg of deceit, we’re going to hear a stream of exclusively positive accomplishments.
The narrative becomes that Blumenthal is a victim of excessive, cruel nitpicking. The Vietnam fibs were a victimless crime, no more heinous than reporting his weight from that time period, instead of confessing the additional stone that crept up on him. Oh, those pedantic Conservatives!
While the current Administration has raised application of the Ted Kennedy Criteria to an art form, Conservatives should not fall into this moral relativism game. It’s one thing to forgive indiscretions on an individual basis. It’s quite another to tolerate and tacitly approve of various forms of lying, cheating, and stealing. Of talent there is plenty, but integrity is precious.
Update: Jules Crittenden is trying to come up with a catchy verb for the Blumenthal treatment, since Swiftboating is somehow not working. If we can go with a noun, how about a Viet Prong?
Update II: Fred Thompson plays the ‘weasel’ card.
Update III: The ever-verbose Alan Colmes manages to enumerate a variety of things which Rand Paul is against. An equally meaningful, simpler statement would have been: “Rand Paul is for limited government.”