You can watch the news conference on Real Clear Politics here (thanks to TSO for the link).
First of all, it is kinda of ironic that Blumenthal was defending himself against allegations that he lied about serving overseas in a combat zone in a VFW hall. Everybody knows that to be a member of the VFW you have to serve overseas in a combat zone. In my opinion, he had no business setting foot in a VFW hall.
Blumenthal surrounded himself with veterans (mostly Marines) and one spoke defended Blumenthal against the allegations he lied before Blumenthal spoke. On the Fox News feed, I heard a lot of “hooahs” and no “oorahs”. Marines don’t say “hooah” and most of the vets I saw on screen were Marines. Seem strange to anybody else?
Blumenthal starts out by emphasizing he “volunteered” to serve in the Marine Corps reserve. In a technical sense, yes. However, it is clear that for five years (from 1965 to 1970) he avoided serving in an active-duty unit that could have been sent to Vietnam. In 1970, he did not receive a deferment and that is the year he joined the Marine Corps Reserve.
Blumenthal then admits to a “few misplaced words” and that he misspoke “on a few occasions”. I guess a “few ocassions” means eight times, including in print news articles that he didn’t make an effort to correct. He also stated he “regrets” those words. Yeah, I would regret them too when my lies become national news.
Blumenthal then took questions and in response to one question he chastises the New York Times for barely mentioning his reserve service and deingrating the Reserves in its article. Here are some excerpts from the New York Times article, you decide if they barely mention his reserve service:
“In 1970, with his last deferment in jeopardy, he landed a coveted spot in the Marine Reserve, which virtually guaranteed that he would not be sent to Vietnam. He joined a unit in Washington that conducted drills and other exercises and focused on local projects, like fixing a campground and organizing a Toys for Tots drive.”
“He said he had tried to stick to a consistent way of describing his military experience: that he served as a member of the United State Marine Corps Reserve during the Vietnam era.”
“In April 1970, Mr. Blumenthal secured a spot in the Marine Corps Reserve, which was regarded as a safe harbor for those who did not want to go to war.”
“Mr. Blumenthal landed in the Fourth Civil Affairs Group in Washington, whose members included the well-connected in Washington. At the time, the unit was not associated with the kind of hardship of traditional fighting units, according to Marine reports from the period and interviews with about a half-dozen men who served in the unit during the Vietnam years.”
The Times also posted this picture of Blumenthal in his blues:
Obviously, they didn’t ignore his service in the Reserves. Now on the issue of deningrating the reserves during the Vietnam War, it is a fact that (with a very few exceptions) the vast majority of reserve and National Guard units did not deploy to Vietnam. Service in those units was seen by many as a way of avoiding service overseas. That is indisputable.
there is a highly decorated Vietnam vet running for this senate seat and his name is Rob Simmons.
Simmons is the man, I know him fairly well.
Dan- Do you have a link that talks about it being a VFW hall, or did you watch it or what? I am scrambling for info, and don’t have a TV in my office.
TSO–Fox News website has it at a VFW hall. And if that in fact is the case, the VFW credibility just took another hit in my book. I don’t care WHAT this guy’s political affiliation is, the VFW is supposed to be above politics. They’re starting to really piss me off, and remind me of a version of AARP for vets.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/05/18/blumenthal_defends_military_career_i_did_misspeak.html
I hate to defend the VFW, but this was likely a local decision and not VFW national. I know in TAL that each post is autonomous although their actions must conform with charter. Candidates can rent the halls, provided that they not use any VFW, TAL logo or anything like that. I didn’t see any Legion or VFW caps behind him, and for that I am grateful.
All I know is that Rob Simmons, his opponent, is the real damn deal.
Some VFW members tried to get me to join but I never served in a combat zone. So I wouldn’t join. I think they just wanted my money. My dad was a post commander. He never ask me to join.
Huh, I guess Democrats’s didn’t have a problem “denigrating the Reserves” and the NG up until now.
Spade-
You read my mind…the double standard is alive and well.
Typical.
How do you know when a lawyer is lying?
His lips are moving.
I hereby dub thee. . . .pogue.
Seems he may have been a snake/liar for quite a while?
Blumenthal in the Nixon White House
May 18, 2010 – 11:50 AM | by: James Rosen
As the New York Times has reported, Connecticut Attorney General and Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal remained stateside during the Vietnam War thanks to five deferments he obtained, the last of which enabled him to take a job in the Nixon White House.
During research for my book The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Doubleday 2008), I uncovered some documents that showed Blumenthal, then a staff lawyer for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a key domestic policy adviser to the president, had aroused the suspicions of Attorney General Mitchell.
The year was 1969, and the country was wracked by divisions over the war. A massive march on Washington was held over the long weekend of November 13-16. The organizing group, the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or “New Mobe,” rallied upwards of 250,000 people to descend on the nation’s capital — then a record-shattering turnout for the first major antiwar protest against the Nixon administration.
Despite pledges of nonviolence by New Mobe leaders, an ad hoc committee of Justice Department, Pentagon, and D.C. police officials reckoned otherwise. “The potential for violence, with resulting injuries and possible deaths, as well as damage to real and personal property…is extremely high,” concluded the group’s internal report.
Against this backdrop of political tension and the prospect of violence by radical groups — indeed, the Justice Department was attacked over the weekend, with windows smashed and the building defaced, amid plumes of tear gas unleashed by police — Attorney General Mitchell came to believe that the youthful Blumenthal, who was deputized to serve as a liaison to the New Mobe, was actually “taking orders” from Mobe leaders, “and in turn directing the District Police to do [the group’s bidding].”
That was how Moynihan summarized Mitchell’s views to top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the declassified documents show. Upon orders from the attorney general, Ehrlichman staffer Egil Krogh — later infamous as the head of the Plumbers, the covert group that conceived and executed the break-ins at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex — called Blumenthal on the telephone with stern orders. Krogh instructed him to withdraw from all contact with the demonstrators; Blumenthal complied.
The incident upset Moynihan, who complained to Ehrlichman that Attorney General Mitchell was “mistaken” about the young attorney. “Dick was not taking orders from anyone, nor giving them to anyone,” Moynihan told Ehrlichman in a November 25, 1969 memorandum, previously unpublished. “He was merely passing on to the mayor and deputy mayor information they requested he obtain. This is at least Dick’s story, and I believe it….The trouble is that now, as last February, when the Washington Post began reporting a great (and non-existent) rift between me and Mitchell…the attorney general just seems to assume Blumenthal is the cause of trouble.”
Moynihan finished the memo with a swipe at the attorney general, who before government service in the Nixon administration had been a leading municipal bond counsel on Wall Street: “It is time he acted a bit more lawyer-like, if you want my opinion.”
Mitchell dropped the issue, and Blumenthal continued on Moynihan’s staff. However the documents show that Blumenthal later hesitated to accept a job working for Donald Rumsfeld, then head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, because Blumenthal was “worried about the A.G.’s [attorney general’s] reaction (as yet unknown).” That assessment was recorded in a January 1970 memo exchanged between two White House aides, Chester Finn and Kenneth Cole, on Ehrlichman’s staff.
Not that I don’t trust the Democrats (cough-cough), but I’d like to know if those “veterans” who stood behind Blumenthal were really veterans.
I mean, the “people-as-props” Democrats put lab coats on shills who weren’t doctors to make them look like doctors at an Obama-care news conference.
Does anyone recognize those people standing behind Blumenthal?
When I said I was in The Battle Of Endor, what I meant was I was in the theater watching it…them Ewoks are some bad sum’bitches.
http://www.skytroopers.org/now_theyre_feeling_guilty.htm
NOW THEY’RE FEELING GUILTY
The “I-missed- Vietnam” Guilt
“The day I turned 19, I went down for my physical and had my first and only experience of Army life. I took with me a letter from Dr. Murphy, my childhood doctor, describing in uncompromising detail the asthma that had been a major part of my life up to 16.”
Thus begins an article by Christopher Buckley in the September issue of Esquire magazine – an article that should spur millions of members of a generation of American men to question a part of their lives that they had thought they put behind them long ago. Buckley – the son of conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr. – describes in the article how he had received a medical deferment from the Army, and thus how he had escaped going to Vietnam.
The article is titled “Viet Guilt, ” and it addresses itself to those millions of young American men who did not go to Vietnam – and who are beginning to realize, all these years later, that by not going they may have proved something about their own lack of courage – their own, lack of manhood, if you will – that ought to make them very uncomfortable. Enough words have been devoted to the moral issues of the war. The point that Chris Buckley makes is that, if the truth were really to be told, most of the men who managed to stay home from Vietnam did not do so for reasons of morality alone. Their real reason for not going was that they did not want to die, did not want to get shot at. And they found out that there were many ways to avoid Vietnam. Young men of my generation got out of Vietnam because of college deferments, because of medical deferments, because of having a “lucky” number in the Selective Service birthday lottery that was initiated toward the end of the war. Three million men of fighting age went to Indochina during the Vietnam War; 16 million men of fighting age did not.
Buckley was one of the men who did not – and I was, too. Reading his article made me realize the truth of the emotions I have been feeling lately about that particular subject. I sense a strong feeling – “shame” is not too strong a word – among many men who did not go to Vietnam, and perhaps now is the time to bring that feeling out into the open.
Those of us who did not go may have pretended that we held some moral superiority over those who did, but we must have known – even back then – that that was largely sham. A tiny, tiny minority served jail terms – the rest of us avoided the war through easier methods. The men who went to Vietnam were no more involved with the politics of the war than we were. They were different from us in only two important ways: They hadn’t figured out a successful way to get out of going, and they had a certain courage that we lacked. Not “courage” as defined the way we liked to define it; not “courage” in the sense of opposing the government’s policies in Vietnam. But courage in an awful, day-to-day sense; courage in being willing to be over there while most of their generation stayed home. When I meet men my age who are Vietnam veterans, I find myself reacting the same way that Chris Buckley indicates he does.
I find myself automatically feeling a little lacking. “I have friends who served in Vietnam…” Buckley writes. “They all saw death up close every day, and many days dealt with it themselves.” They’re married, happy, secure, good at what they do; they don’t have nightmares and they don’t shoot up gas stations with M-16s. Each has a gentleness I find rare in most others, and beneath it a spiritual sinew that I ascribe to their experience in the war. I don’t think I’ll ever have what they have, the aura of I have been weighed on the scales and have not been found wanting, and my sense at this point is that I will always feel the lack of it…” “I will always feel the lack of it.”
I think many of us are just beginning to realize that. I know when I meet those men of my generation who did serve in Vietnam, I automatically feel less worthy than they are; yes, less of a man, if you want to use that phrase. Those of us who did not have to go to Vietnam may have felt, at the time, that we were getting away with something; may have felt, at the time, that we were the recipients of a particular piece of luck that had value beyond price. But now, I think, we realize that by not having had to go we lost forever the chance to learn certain things about ourselves that only men who have been in war together will ever truly know.
Our fathers learned those things in World War II; our sons, God forbid, may learn them in some future conflict. But we – those of us who did not go – managed to avoid something that would have helped form us into different people than we are now. Buckley writes “by not putting on uniforms, we forfeited what might have been the ultimate opportunity, in increasingly self-obsessed times, of making the ultimate commitment to something greater than ourselves. The survival of comrades.” But I think it may go even beyond that; I think it may go to the very definition of our manhood. I know that when I meet a man who, it turns out, has served in Vietnam, part of me wonders whether he is able to read my mind.
I don’t know how widespread this feeling is among men of my generation who didn’t go; but I can testify that, at least for some of us, it’s there, all right.
By Bob Greene
WELCOME HOME VETERANS!
Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Vietnam combat veteran and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has often expressed anger about the class gap between those who fought in Vietnam and those who did not.
“I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units,” he wrote in his 1995 autobiography, My American Journey. “Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.”
By James Bamford for USA TODAY
17 September 2002
Is it just me, or does something smell funny about this whole thing? The NYT exposed him. CNN said his statements either out right saying or implying he was in Vietnam when he wasn’t stole something from those who were there. Whose corn flakes did this guy pee in for the usually dependable left to turn on him? Could he have been too pro veteran?
What he did was inexcusable. That we see that here is not unusual. That the liberal media does leaves me with questions about who the liberals plan to stick in his place.
Claymore even though it had a huge effect on the empire the battle of endor was nothing like the second Battle of Geonosis. That was crazy…
(Just in case anyone was wondering I wasn’t really there but I saw it on tv.)
I acknowledge his having earned the right to be called Marine and to wear the uniform. I don’t know about enlisting in the USMC Reserve to avoid deployment to Vietnam. If he lied about having been a Vietnam Veteran then shame on him. All Vietnam Vets, irrespective of their branch of service, deserve a very special and heartfelt salute and thanks and shame on anyone who lies about having been there.
VFW has a statement up about Blumenthal using the hall.
VFW national did not sanction and was not, in fact, aware that the press conference was going to be held at a VFW Post. This decision was made at the Post level and the VFW Department of Connecticut issued the following:
The following statement is by Richard DiFederico, Department Commander Connecticut VFW:
“Those who served in Vietnam or offshore or in neighboring countries rightfully earned all the belated thanks and appreciation our nation can muster. Those who served in uniform during the Vietnam era also deserve our gratitude, which makes Mr. Blumenthal’s claim to be something he is not so outrageous. It diminishes the service of all who served and sacrificed, most especially those whose names are inscribed on the Vietnam Wall. Mr. Blumenthal was considered one of the best friends a veteran could have in Connecticut. It is a true shame that he let a false claim of Vietnam service change that.”
VFW National Commander Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., endorses this statement. In sum, the fact that this event was held at a VFW location cannot, in any manner, be construed as a formal endorsement of the candidate.
In better news 100 grand has been added to the reward for the Mohave Cross
The decision was made at the post level. Originally the VFW flag was behind his left shoulder but was removed after repeated calls. CT. Also has a very active mens auxillary with the VFW Dick may be a member I haven’t checked. After watching the confrence at my post and for the first time seeing people get mad at Dick (even though 2 out of four running are members of my post) I decided to check out the rest of the posts in my area. No one is happy so it should be an interesting state convention next month.
Also. I’m unable to prove anything as of yet but I’m told by some of the west Hartford VFW members that no one on stage was a VFW member. And they do not discriminate to who rents the hall unless we’re talking rock shows or rowdy bachelor parties.