OPINION:
Leo Rosten’s “The Joys of Yiddish” says chutzpah can be translated as “gall” or “brazen nerve.” He also memorably described it as that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his parents, begs for mercy “because he is an orphan.” No one, really no one, performed more outlandishly in the Kavanaugh hearings than “Danang Dick,” as President Trump mocked Connecticut’s Democratic senator for his military service.
Mr. Blumenthal’s most stunning chutzpah moment arrived when he asked Brett Kavanaugh during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings if he was familiar with the phrase “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,” a Latin legal term that permits jurors to find that a witness’ total testimony can be viewed as false if they find he has lied about a single instance. “The core of why we’re here,” he lectured the U.S. Supreme Court justice nominee, “is really credibility,” a virtue the senator wanted the public to know he passionately embraced.
True enough, as even conservatives noted, Mr. Blumenthal’s false claims about his service in Vietnam were wildly embellished by the president. But he had nailed down a crucial point: Mr. Blumenthal had won his Senate seat after uttering Titanic tales about his war record. Yet few critics of the senator ever spelled out what needs to be spelled out for the sake of clarity: The depth of Mr. Blumenthal’s ignominious effort to portray himself as an enthusiastic Vietnam veteran who was willing to face combat. The expose of his false heroics did not come from “right-wingers,” “fringe groups” or “conspiracy theorists” like Alex Jones, but from that bible of liberalism, The New York Times.
Here’s what The Times informed its readers on May 17, 2010. At a ceremony honoring veterans in Norwalk, Connecticut, in March 2008, Mr. Blumenthal, the state attorney general who was running for the U.S. Senate, informed the gathering that he had “learned something important since the days I served in Vietnam,” and that is, whatever one may think about the wars this country is involved in, “we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”
The trouble with this and similar statements, The Times reported, is that he “never served in Vietnam.” Indeed, he “obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war…”
The deferments he took, it added, permitted Mr. Blumenthal “to complete his studies at Harvard; pursue a graduate fellowship in England; serve as a special assistant to the Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham; and ultimately take a job in the Nixon White House.”
But there’s more that Blumenthal backers who loved his anti-Kavanaugh attacks should find cringe worthy. “In 1970,” The Times went on, “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.”
What was particularly striking about Mr. Blumenthal’s record, The Times added, “is the contrast between the many steps he took that allowed him to avoid Vietnam, and the misleading way he often speaks about that period of his life now, especially when he is speaking at veterans’ ceremonies or other patriotic events.”
“Sometime his remarks have been plainly untrue,” noted The Times, while at other times, in using “more ambiguous language,” the audience is still left with the impression that he served in Vietnam.
In attempting to counter the expose, Mr. Blumenthal conceded he had misspoken about his service during the Norwalk event and might have misspoken on other occasions. But he asserted that his ” ’intention has always been to be completely clear and accurate and straightforward, out of respect to the veterans who serve in Vietnam.’”
But The Times wasn’t satisfied with this response, either. An examination of his remarks at various ceremonies, the newspaper added, “shows that he does not volunteer that his service never took him overseas.” And when he describes the hostile reaction directed at veterans coming back from Vietnam, he intimates “that he was among them.”
The Times said that Mr. Blumenthal is considered a brilliant lawyer who uses language with “power and precision,” but seems to have avoided the “precision” part in his speaking about his military service and in giving biographical information to his home state newspapers. In at least eight newspaper articles published in Connecticut from 2003 to 2009, The Times discovered he was “described as having served in Vietnam.”
Typical, wrote The Times, was a report in the May 23, 2008, Shelton Weekly, which reported “that Mr. Blumenthal ’was met with applause when he spoke about his experience as a Marine sergeant in Vietnam.’”
The idea that he willingly served in Vietnam, The Times remarked, “has become such an accepted part of his public biography that when a national outlet, Slate magazine, produced a profile of Mr. Blumenthal in 2000, it said he had ’enlisted in the Marines rather that duck the Vietnam draft.’”
If alive today, Mr. Rosten, I believe, would certainly add “Senator Richard Blumenthal” to his list of colorful chutzpah synonyms.
• Allan H. Ryskind was a longtime editor and owner of Human Events. His latest book is “Hollywood Traitors” (Regnery, 2015).
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