You're Pretty Sure President Lies-So-Much Is Lying About Richard Blumenthal And Vietnam. But How?
Fact 1: US Senator Richard Blumenthal is on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Fact 2: Richard Blumenthal opposes the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Fact 3: In 2010, the New York Timesproved that Blumenthal, who was then running for the Senate, had frequently referred to himself as a Vietnam veteran, when in reality, he had been in the Marine Reserve from 1970 to 1976 -- while the Vietnam conflict was going on, but safely stateside. It was very embarrassing for Blumenthal, but Connecticut voters elected him anyway, and went ahead and reelected him in 2016. Needless to say, Republicans have never been able to let go of it, because it is the most awful thing ever, almost as bad as Elizabeth Warren believing she has Cherokee ancestors. Orrin Hatch expressed his ire by pushing to amend the "Stolen Valor Act" so Blumenthal could be jailed and maybe waterboarded, but the whole law got tossed out in 2012 when the Supreme Court decided lying about military service is protected by the First Amendment. Antonin Scalia was in the majority.
Now, Cadet Bonespurs and every Republican on the Internet are screaming at Blumenthal, insisting that Fact 3 utterly disqualifies him from being able to ever say a bad thing about Brett Kavanaugh, because nobody in the White House has ever heard of a logical fallacy, ever.
Here's Donald Trump from Saturday, actually managing the impressive achievement of lying about what Blumenthal lied about:
Not even close -- Blumenthal got caught in far more mundane lies: In speeches, he referred to vague stuff like coming back from war or serving in Vietnam, when really he'd served during Vietnam. But no, he never told false stories about having been in battle (or even being in combat at all) or having narrowly escaped death.
Trump repeated that second-order lie again yesterday during his presser on Kavanaugh, adding another lie on top of it and saying Blumenthal cried like anything when he was caught out: "tears were all over the place." Which, again, never happened -- Blumenthal blustered a bit, said he'd been quoted out of context, and then issued an apology, all without any tears. But it would make a better story if Blumenthal had blubbered, so Trump tells it that way.
Say, if tears are so unmanly, why didn't Trump pull Kavanaugh's nomination after the man blubbered about his calendar like it was Don Draper's Carousel Slide projector?
Of course, Donald Trump is himself a war hero, having bravely gotten five deferments and then avoided the draft by getting a doctor's note for heel spurs that miraculously healed themselves. He later couldn't even remember which foot had been afflicted. But he did at least remember to tell Howard Stern about his own Vietnam, the struggle to avoid getting the clap in the disco culture of the '70s and '80s.
I've been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there — it's scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider[.]
Venereal diseases were out there everywhere, waging guerrilla war against Donald Trump's penis. Like Charlie, every minute herpes squatted in the bush, getting stronger. Could tertiary syphilis explain why Trump's memory of Richard Blumenthal's exaggerations is so poor? We are only asking.
Or maybe it's simply the other thing Trump carries: an inability to settle for mere reality. Crom knows if Trump were going to invent a service record for himself, it would be a doozy, with napalm and rescuing screaming Vietnamese children from German concentration camps, and maybe freeing some slaves, too. Why would anyone settle for a far more boring fib like Blumenthal's?
In any case, we would just like to point out once again that none of this has anything to do with Brett Kavanaugh's fitness for the Supreme Court. Here's a little test Donald Trump can try, all for himself: Suppose Richard Blumenthal had simply said he'd served in the Marine Reserve stateside during the '70s. Would that change a single Republican's opinion on Kavanaugh? Also, how would that affect whether Christine Blasey Ford had told the truth?
Oh, of course it would. If only Richard Blumenthal hadn't lied and cried, Republicans would have definitely been convinced by his powerful moral example and would have demanded another nominee.
[NYT / Hartford Courant / NBC News]
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Doktor Zoom's real name is Marty Kelley, and he lives in the wilds of Boise, Idaho. He is not a medical doctor, but does have a real PhD in Rhetoric. You should definitely donate some money to this little mommyblog where he has finally found acceptance and cat pictures. He is on maternity leave until 2033. Here is his Twitter, also. His quest to avoid prolixity is not going so great.
