A Little Much

I think Lizardbreath has a point here. This isn’t to say that I entirely I agree with her take; I stand by my basic comments yesterday and am still not inclined to give Blumenthal the benefit of the doubt, meaning that (again! what are the odds?) I agree with Saletan. To the extent that I remain a lot less charitable than LB, it’s the point raised by Dave: not only is embedding technically-true-but-highly-misleading statements about your service in reactionary bullshit about the way Vietnam vets were treating dismaying in itself, but it I think it also pushes the claims from “dissembling” to “lying.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that this particular stabbed-in-the-back myth was about soldiers returning from Vietnam, not reservists supervising toy drives as part of a de facto draft dodge. So I think the technically-true-but-highly-misleading statements are completely fair game.

Having said that, a politician dissembling and sometimes worse about his credentials isn’t exactly the scandal of the century, and it’s very hard to see what the added value of this more recent front page story is. (UPDATE: Actually, I think that’s too weak. Shays’s carefully unfalsifiable but not very plausible stories about what he had been led to believe and what he almost did are pretty repellent, and there’s no excuse for giving him a forum in a front page alleged news story.)