Connecticut’s very liberal Democrat career politician hasn’t distinguished himself much in his first (and let us pray only) term in the United States Senate. But he has earned himself a reputation of sorts.

No, I am not talking about his nearly getting clipped by an Amtrak train during a ridiculous and tragedy-exploiting press conference on safety:

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But I am talking about exploiting tragedy. And about his suffering from Brian Williams Syndrome. Yesterday, Blumenthal went on MSNBC to attack a Ted Cruz Super PAC ad on the Texan’s Second Amendment leadership in the face of the 2012 school shootings in Newtown, Conn. Said Blumenthal to Chris Matthews: “I was there when those families learned their six beautiful children [sic], and, 20 children and six great educators would not be coming home that night.”

The problem with this claim — which more than implies that Blumenthal was physically present at what had to be a moment of dramatic shock and exquisite suffering — is that he wasn’t there. The governor was there, and so were some other officials (the local state senator, John McKinney), when the grisly truth was told to the families.

But Dick Blumenthal wasn’t there when that happened.

Just like he wasn’t in Vietnam. Recall this from the New York Times in 2010:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”
There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.

To paraphrase that famous move line: Senator, you can’t handle the truth.

One last thing about Tricky Dick: He is fighting to prohibit taxpayer-funded “Paid Patriotism” at sporting events, stating “Honoring our hometown heroes should definitely have been done, but without fattening the bottom line of our sports franchises.” Fair enough. But this is the same Dick Blumenthal who, as Connecticut’s Attorney General in the late 1990s, pushed a massive corporate-welfare scheme to have Nutmeg State taxpayers spend half a billion dollars to lure the Patriots from Boston to Hartford (and then threatened to sue the team and the NFL when the deal to move blew up).