{"id":6116,"date":"2010-05-18T12:37:07","date_gmt":"2010-05-18T19:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=6116"},"modified":"2010-05-18T12:49:30","modified_gmt":"2010-05-18T19:49:30","slug":"youd-lie-too-if-you-were-a-politician","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2010\/05\/18\/youd-lie-too-if-you-were-a-politician\/","title":{"rendered":"You’d lie too if you were a Politician."},"content":{"rendered":"

“Although I did not serve in Vietnam….” <\/a>— <\/em><\/p>\n

That is, roughly, Richard Blumenthal’s rebuttal to the revelation on\u00c2\u00a0his career of Vietnam War Resume Enhancing — or, Lying<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Surely he had his chances to clear\u00c2\u00a0up the media reports that followed his Vietnam Service line but chose not to.\u00c2\u00a0 I gather this video demonstrates his awareness of the Looming Cloud — it may be\u00c2\u00a0a case of seeing things, but I detect this certain halting manner in\u00c2\u00a0his speech\u00c2\u00a0— he would go ahead and correct the record he allowed\u00c2\u00a0to fester in self-service.<\/p>\n

Personally, this story strikes me as a Tempest in a Teapot.\u00c2\u00a0 If at first blush my thought was, “Shouldn’t derail his\u00c2\u00a0political 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.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Blumenthal can run for something else in another election cycle, “Regain the Public Trust”.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Now I’m staring at it, and am generally unable to see why this deserves much of a fuss.\u00c2\u00a0 But if it receives its fuss — Fuss it shall have.\u00c2\u00a0 Filing Deadline ticks on in<\/a>; throw this in as one\u00c2\u00a0item in\u00c2\u00a0your pile of assessments, but my gut tells me this story will likely fade even if John Cornyn hopes it can sustain itself to November.
\nA little ironically, the Washington Monthly blog berated the Republican Class of ’94<\/a> with a notation of Wes Cooley<\/a>, whose political career brings us a more\u00c2\u00a0acute and severe\u00c2\u00a0case of that\u00c2\u00a0“Wannabe Veterans Disease”\u00c2\u00a0that\u00c2\u00a0inflicts Blumenthal.<\/p>\n

Myself, I ignore a lot of political biography that politicians paint for us, and thus probably would\u00c2\u00a0have let his\u00c2\u00a0“Lessons I learned in Vietnam Service” fly right past me.\u00c2\u00a0 I tend to detect a lot of bull-shitting<\/em> in the words office-seekers throw out, so suggest that the record of political office-holding and campaign contributors (you know — who\u00c2\u00a0has bought\u00c2\u00a0the man?) be combed throw before learning about when you found Jesus or whatever.\u00c2\u00a0 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\u00c2\u00a0people in the\u00c2\u00a0public that demand to believe in<\/em> certain peculiar things is sometimes a\u00c2\u00a0strange matter.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0This morning, I heard the last\u00c2\u00a0quarter of an hour\u00c2\u00a0of the Bill Press Show.\u00c2\u00a0 He was hob-nobbing\u00c2\u00a0and wringing his hands with\u00c2\u00a0Larry Sabato.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 This is a man, Bill Press, who stood full-square in the\u00c2\u00a0Democratic\u00c2\u00a0Presidential Primary behind a\u00c2\u00a0 Hillary Clinton who\u00c2\u00a0pulled out of whole cloth\u00c2\u00a0this bit about getting struck by Bosnian Snipers.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0This matter\u00c2\u00a0may 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”.\u00c2\u00a0 Meantime, there was this politically potent part of the electorate who came to believe rather bizarre things about the service of John Kerry<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

For the record, I hadn’t much concern for George W Bush’s\u00c2\u00a0spotty\u00c2\u00a0war record\u00c2\u00a0— seemed worth a day of entertaining political theater and not much else– tells a story of Class, I suppose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Although I did not serve in Vietnam….” — That is, roughly, Richard Blumenthal’s rebuttal to the revelation on\u00c2\u00a0his career of Vietnam War Resume Enhancing — or, Lying.\u00c2\u00a0 Surely he had his chances to clear\u00c2\u00a0up the media reports that followed his Vietnam Service line but chose not to.\u00c2\u00a0 I gather this video demonstrates his awareness of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6116"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6135,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6116\/revisions\/6135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}