Blumenthralled

Connecticut Democrats endorsed state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to run for the Senate seat currently occupied by Chris Dodd despite Blumenthal's misstatements about his military service during the Vietnam War and despite Chris Matthews's repeated attacks on Blumenthal for saying he had served "in" Vietnam rather than "during" Vietnam. It was done the old fashioned way, at a state party convention.

Blumenthal may have the ability to get through this crisis unscathed. Saying that you served in Vietnam when you meant during Vietnam seems like a plausible mistake to make and an easy one to let go unnoticed because it involves a deviation of one word. A reservist who said he served in Vietnam but in fact remained stateside may not necessarily be referring to the country or the war, but rather the times. For many, the word Vietnam means an era. It's a word that conjures up a time in American history when this country's involvement in that war tore the country apart at home and pitted one American against another over the role of the United States abroad. The fractures that resulted never really healed.

If you served in the military in the late sixties and early seventies - a time when the war in Southeast Asia made an association with the military an undesirable one - you may not have served in the place called Vietnam, but you served in the state of mind called Vietnam. And since Blumenthal used the phrases "during Vietnam" and "in Vietnam" more or less interchangeably, and since he referred to Vietnam and the Vietnam era intermittently, I think it can be said that Blumenthal never meant to mislead anyone and got himself in trouble for reasons that boiled down to semantics.

(You might chalk up my observations to partisanship, but in fact I gave George Walker Bush a pass when he referred to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan allowing terrorists in its harbors, though Afghanistan is a landlocked country. Many people agreed with me that Bush was speaking metaphorically.)

Despite Blumenthal's record of service to veterans as a state public official and an impeccable record as Connecticut's top law enforcement officer, none of what I just said is going to stop the Republicans or either of their U.S. Senate hopefuls from using his own words against him. Linda McMahon had already planned to do so before the New York Times reported this story; indeed, her campaign helped the paper with its research. Rob Simmons, who did serve in Vietnam - the place - will make it an issue if he is the Republican nominee. Simmons is favored to win the nomination at the Republican state convention but if McMahon gets 15 percent of the delegates at the convention, that would force a primary between the two, setting up a primary campaign that noted wrestling impresario McMahon could outspend Simmons in and possibly end up winning. Then, imagine what she could do to Blumenthal.

I endorse Rob Simmons for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Connecticut. It would be a travesty if Linda McMahon were to be the next senator from that state, especially given the fact that she became president of her wrestling league in the early nineties as a legal maneuver when her husband, wrestling mogul Vince McMahon, was implicated in a steroid scandal. That she is proud of her tenure as the president of an institution that has had such a toxic influence on our culture - she's not the affable personality Jesse Ventura is, either - is enough to cause concern.

And before Chris Matthews starts acting high and mighty, do I have to mention his own legendary gaffes?