Idiot

Great — one of the Senate seats that should be relatively easy to maintain in a bad political year, and we have a Tim Johnson on our hands. Time to find someone else to be the Democratic candidate.

Added (by davenoon): There’s much to loathe about Blumenthal in this story, but arguably the worst angle to it — at least from an historian’s vantage point — is his apparent willingness to repeat the conspicuously untrue legend that returning soldiers were routinely spat upon and otherwise assaulted at war’s end:

In an interview, Jean Risley, the chairwoman of the Connecticut Vietnam Veterans Memorial Inc., recalled listening to an emotional Mr. Blumenthal offering remarks at the dedication of the memorial. She remembered him describing the indignities that he and other veterans faced when they returned from Vietnam.

“It was a sad moment,” she recalled. “He said, ‘When we came back, we were spat on; we couldn’t wear our uniforms.’ It looked like he was sad to me when he said it.”

Fables about soldiers being spat upon were, of course, central to the right wing narrative that our loss in Vietnam had everything to do with gutless opponents of the war and nothing to do with the fact that the US decided to squander two decades in the effort to create, sponsor and fight on behalf of a South Vietnamese government that was loathed by the majority of its people and never stood a chance of surviving on its own. There’s no hope, I suppose, that these myths will ever be removed from popular memory of the war; the fact that media coverage of Blumenthal’s other lies will completely ignore this one will only underscore its baleful durability.