"We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam," Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008.“And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

Richard Blumenthal is an American lawyer and politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he has been Attorney General of Connecticut since 1991. He is a candidate in the 2010 U.S. Senate election for the seat currently held by Christopher Dodd.

A lot of the insta-commentary has been to the effect that Blumenthal is just another sleazy politician. But this gets it wrong by a mile–for almost two decades, Blumenthal has been so pure, so revered throughout Connecticut that he has seemed to exist in a realm beyond politics. That’s not exaggeration. Everything about Blumenthal seemed to set him apart from the ordinary sleaze and compromise of big-time politics, especially in recent years as Joe Lieberman succumbed to narcissism and Chris Dodd’s sweetheart Countrywide mortgage tarnished him beyond redemption (or at least beyond reelection). For as long as I can remember, Blumenthal has been the crusading consumer advocate, humble, modest, unprepossessing, with that guileless Brylcreem haircut that somehow made him seem even more honorable–a throwback to an earlier era.



The video, which was sent over by the DSCC, will be central to Blumenthal's damage control efforts in the wake of a stunning New York Times report saying Blumenthal never served in Vietnam despite repeatedly suggesting otherwise. The pushback from the Blumenthal camp, the heavy favorite to win the Senate race, will be that Blumenthal did not intend to deceive.

To be clear, the video does not get Blumenthal off the hook for his previous claims to have served. But the video, which is from a debate in March, suggests that Blumenthal was not wedded in all settings to maintaining the fiction that he did active duty In the vid, Blumenthal says:

"Although I did not serve in Vietnam, I have seen firsthand the effects of military action, and no one wants it to be the first resort, nor do we want to mortgage the country's future with a deficit that is ballooning out of control."

The Times, however, unearthed repeated instances of Blumenthal stating clearly, or leaving a very strong impression, that he had served abroad.

In a sense, the above video only makes the story more bizarre: Blumenthal is a highly-regarded lawyer who clearly knows how to wield language effectively, and in the setting of a debate, he clearly had no interest in deceiving his audience. Yet in other multiple settings he did just that, either through incompetence or by design.




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