U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has a way of sneaking up on the
truth and clubbing it to death with either a half-truth or a persistent,
outright lie. And over a period of time, a pattern has begun to develop: The
alluring possibility of flooding one's political stage with heroic action is,
in Mr. Blumenthal’s case, irresistible. It’s like dangling a pacifier before a
non-aborted baby.
NBC
Connecticut news is now reporting that “Sen. Richard Blumenthal is
facing criticism over claims he lied in a comment he made in an MSNBC interview
about being in Newtown when families were being informed about losing their
loved ones in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting massacre.”
NBC noted: “Blumenthal asserted during an interview with
MSNBC's Chris Matthews last night, ‘I was there when (emphasis
mine) those families learned that their 20 beautiful children and six great
educators would not be coming home that night’ … The comment was made in
response to a television ad in support of presidential candidate and Texas US
Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican… Blumenthal arrived at Sandy Hook hours
after the tragedy occurred and even longer after most families had been
notified that their child had been murdered (emphasis
mine).”
Connecticut’s U.S. Senator and former Attorney General was
always a glory hound. Most professional politicians are as addicted to fame as
any Hollywood starlet, but the temptation to bask in the glory of others is
in most cases tempered by a sense of modesty, which is the shameful face
braggarts show to reality. Most politicians know they haven’t parted the Red Sea
or led the Israelites out of bondage. Sometimes, if modesty is unavailable, the
dread suspicion that “someone is looking” serves as a brake on unrestrained
ambition, the mother’s milk of politicians on the make. Problem: Very few
reporters and commentators in Connecticut’s unquestioning media were looking
closely at Mr. Blumenthal. Why should they have done so; was the Attorney General
not providing them with daily doses of news?
Mr. Blumenthal, let it be said, has been on the make since
graduating from Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Crimson and developed a
felicity with the language that would serve him in good stead during his twenty
odd years as Connecticut’s
showboating Attorney General, during the
course of which Mr. Blumenthal became the maestro of the pointed adjective. If
someone would go through the trouble of collecting in a single book all the
pronouncements Mr. Blumenthal had issued in the form of media releases during
his two decade tenure as Attorney General, the opus might rival in length the
Dodd-Frank omnibus bill that presently serves as an albatross round the neck of
entrepreneurial capital in the un-United States.
It was a preceding Attorney General, former U.S.
Senator Joe Lieberman, also a showboater, who had turned the office into a
consumer protection chop-shop, but Mr. Blumenthal, with a backwind provided by
298 bloviating lawyers, considerably improved the shop’s output. In
2009, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute (CEI) rated Mr. Blumenthal
the worst attorney general in the United States.
But glory-grabbing is old-hat for Mr. Blumenthal. When he was
running for the U.S. Senate in 2010, then Attorney General Blumenthal artfully
dodged several similar howitzers. On multiple occasions and in different
venues, Mr. Blumenthal had advertised himself as a Vietnam War veteran. The
truth, always fungible, was less heroic: Having exhausted his deferments, Mr.
Blumenthal served state-side in Washington DC, where he participated in a Toys
for Tots program — laudable, but miles from the wounded warrior fields of
Vietnam.
At home in Connecticut, some news venues took notice of Mr. Blumenthal’s willful misrepresentations – very briefy.
The Australia Broadcasting Company (ABC) took up the matter and produced a
documentary on stolen valor – “Heroes,
Frauds and Imposters” (hit “play
video” on link), that was not shown anywhere in Connecticut during
Mr. Blumenthal’s run for the U.S. Senate. Following Mr. Blumenthal’s false
Vietnam Veteran assertions, candidate Blumenthal made himself scarce for
interviews; the most dangerous spot in Connecticut was no longer that space
between Mr. Blumenthal and a television camera. ABC reporter Mark Corcoran’s
brief encounter with a ghostly Mr. Blumenthal in “Heroes, Frauds and Imposters”
is rib bustingly hilarious.
Fool me once, the old adage goes, shame on you; fool me
twice, shame on me. In Mr. Blumenthal’s state, shame itself is no longer
shameful; it has declared victim status.
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