Reading your emails, it seems pretty clear that most of our readers who’ve written in think the Richard Blumenthal story is devastating for him and not just a bump in the road. I have to confess though that even on a few readings I found the piece weaker than the billing. As I noted below, that one quote from Blumenthal from 2008 is devastating. Clearly serving or not serving in a war zone is something you have a pretty palpable and immediate recollection of. And given the guy’s other ambiguous statements about what he was doing during Vietnam, you do have to wonder, what was going through his head? (And yes, that’s meant largely rhetorically.)
All that said, I can’t help a level of media critique. Given the Times‘ resources, I can pretty much guarantee you that they fielded a small army of researchers to find other instances where he said the same thing. But apparently they couldn’t find any. Certainly nothing as clear cut. So to fill out the piece they focused on his history of deferments and even tossed in the marginally relevant fact that profiles of him have stated that he was the captain of the swim team at Harvard, even though he wasn’t on the team.
I can’t come down really hard on one side or another on this. Clearly he didn’t find himself claiming he served in Vietnam in that one case out of the blue. The piece in its totality does paint a very damaging picture. But I still can’t help noticing that it relies on a single quote when many others have him saying he was never there. Thoughts?
