Ours is officially a very unforgiving society, especially and specifically when it comes to the words uttered by those in whom we entrust public office. 

In Connecticut, the sitting Attorney General, who is also a candidate for the United States Senate, found himself in the situation of having been on record as saying one thing when the record revealed something else. I’m sympathetic to his point but I’m more sympathetic to the point made by his critics.  

I served in the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War. In fact, of the four years in which I served my country, we were involved in Vietnam in one way or another during all four of them. I did not, however serve IN Vietnam. Never even got close, and to be sure, there is a huge difference in having served during the war and in having served, as Vietnam vets put it, “in country.”  

Richard Blumenthal says he “misspoke” when he referenced having served IN Vietnam during the war. Maybe, but I doubt it.  

What he likely meant to say, had he truly misspoken, was that he served in the military while the Vietnam War was being fought, as I did. He apparently thinks this is a minor point on which his opponents are making political hay. 

It is not. And in my opinion, one doesn’t “misspeak” about something like this.

Tens of thousands of Americans actually fought and died in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of others served while that war was being fought.  This isn’t like Woodstock. You either were there or you weren’t. I am one of those who wasn’t there, and I thank God every day that I didn’t go through the hell that my fellow service men and women who went there did. 

Should Mr. Blumenthal’s entire career be tossed aside because of this single, small, misapplied word? Probably not, but it should invite scrutiny into other claims he’s made about himself. And it should serve as a cautionary note to people in public life that in this era of the 24-hour news cycle, cable news, blog posts and other forms of aggressive, take-no-prisoners media, even a single misstatement involving a single word of only two letters should be scrupulously avoided.