Normally when introducing you to someone else’s column I take their top two paragraph’s and then link you to their full column.
In this case, I am giving you the last graphs of Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker’s column on Atty. Gen. Richard Blumenthal’s lying about his Vietnam service:
Who knows what motivated Blumenthal to stretch his truth? Perhaps it was survivor’s guilt.
“There is nothing that binds Marines together like combat and, if you missed it, I can understand that he [Blumenthal] may have actually convinced himself he was there,” my brother wrote in an e-mail. “But those who served in combat consider Marines who did not the same brothers, regardless. We are a team and those in the rear are just as important as those on the line.”
The deception, as always, is something else. Blumenthal had every right under the law to seek deferments. He had every right to be proud of his service during the Vietnam era. But he did not have the right to build personal equity on the borrowed suffering of others.
Had he gone to Vietnam, as he apparently thinks he should have, he would have learned that, and this: Real heroes never brag, and real Marines don’t lie.
And a blog from Newsweek on the same issue.
