Mark Twain On Connecticut’s Short Session

“No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session”― Mark Twain

And the legislative session is now opened for business.

An item in a state-wide newspaper notes on its front page the “Key Issues” the Democratic controlled legislature in Connecticut will be addressing in its short session. The short session -- less wearing on life, property and liberty than the General Assembly’s long session – mercifully will end in 4 months, at which point the ghost of Mr. Twain may remain untroubled until the long session begins.

Key Issues during the short session will include, according to the paper: “Minimum Wage: proposed increase to $10.10 – Assisted Suicide: Whether doctors may prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill patients – Puppy Mills: Proposal to require new pet shops to sell only rescue and shelter animals.”

Curbs on spending are not among the items listed that the General Assembly will be addressing in its short session.

Connecticut Commentary has already pointed out the pitfalls of the proposed minimum wage legislation, among which are: The legislatively mandated labor cost increase will seriously distort wage scales, increase unemployment and fall like a ton of bricks on the shoulders of the poor.

The proposed Puppy Mill legislation appears, on the face of it, to be a humane measure. However, a bill that taxes puppy mills much in the way Connecticut taxes tobacco products and at the same time frees from any taxation all business or organizations that rehabilitate and sell to the public mistreated animals would address animal welfare far more effectively. The reason such bills are rarely proposed is because they require politicians to sacrifice tax receipts.  

It remains doubtful whether a legislature may constitutionally require a business to sell a specific product. Vested with such an authority, there is not a business in Connecticut that would not be marching on the State Capitol to press legislators for equal treatment.

To take but one example in thousands:  One might expect the largest maker of tires in the country to flood Connecticut’s General Assembly with lobbyists, there to press relevant Democratic committee members to favor them with a bill preventing all tire distributors in the state from selling any product but their own; it goes without saying, of course, that these petitioners would be very generous to obliging legislators come campaign season. Short sessions are much too short to entertain such a massive increase in legislative business. And then too, the Supreme Court has been less than clear on the issue of the forced selling and purchasing of products by crony capitalists who in consequence specialize in purchasing legislators.

One can only imagine what lightning bolts  Mr. Twain might have hurled at the General Assembly of his day had legislators seriously entertained the passage of a bill that would have required cigar makers to sell Mr. Twain only one brand of cigar. At the mere intimation of such an immoral restriction, Mr. Twain’s pen, dipped in the fires of Hell, would have scorched the impudent backsides of those intent on depriving him of his property and liberty.

 Mr. Twain’s taste in cigars required a varied choice of products:

“At last it occurred to me that something was lacking in the Havana cigar. It did not quite fulfill my youthful anticipations. I experimented. I bought what was called a seed-leaf cigar with a Connecticut wrapper. After a while I became satiated of these, and I searched for something else. The Pittsburgh stogy was recommended to me. It certainly had the merit of cheapness, if that be a merit in tobacco, and I experimented with the stogy. Then, once more, I changed off, so that I might acquire the subtler flavor of the Wheeling toby. Now that palled, and I looked around New York in the hope of finding cigars which would seem to most people vile, but which, I am sure, would be ambrosial to me. I couldn't find any.”

Connecticut continues to produce high quality wrappers, but it also has produced Dick Blumenthal, whose suit while Attorney General against Big Tobacco had helped to make Connecticut’s Tobacco Valley into a much reduced backyard patch of ground. As soon as Mr. Blumenthal figures out how he might tax into oblivion the harmless vapors expelled by those of his constituents who choose to “smoke” electronic “cigarettes”, this promising industry – which, by supplanting cancer causing, real tobacco products, very likely may reduce tobacco tax dollars flowing into Connecticut’s bursting revenue streams – will vanish like a puff of smoke, done to death by solicitous, tax hungry politicians.

Mr. Twain, who valued the right word as against a word that was almost right – “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter: It's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning” – certainly would have quarreled energetically with the expression “assisted suicide.”

In a suicide, the corpse and the corpse maker are one and the same person. The word is derived from the Latin suicidium: sui “of oneself” + cidium “a killing.” In Anglo-Latin, the term for “one who commits suicide” was felo-de-se, literally “one guilty concerning himself.” Just as soon as a second person is involved in the killing, a bar is passed from suicide to either manslaughter or murder. Both the man upon whom “suicide” had been committed and his “assistant” participate in guilt.

Such truthful plain-speech, careful never to violate the language, does create difficulties for obscurantist, oleaginous politicians whom Twain – How he is missed! – would have poked mercilessly with his pen fired up in Hell or, better still, with a shattering lightning bolt, about which Mr. Twain in an essay “on The Weather” once wrote, “The lightning there (Hartford?) is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether -- Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.”

Bonding, The Budget And Corporate Welfare

When Mark Twain said ““Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well," he might easily have been talking about bonding.

Usually a state sells bonds to pay for long term capital projects. But like any political practice, the selling of bonds may be subject to abuse. The use of bonding to pay off current expenses that ought to be discharged through tax increases or spending decreases is considered a “no, no” among agencies that rate state bonding. The practice, however, is a “yes, yes” among politicians who want to avoid either the unpleasant option of raising taxes or the equally unpleasant option of cutting spending. The beauty of bonding for such politicians is that it allows them to escape the wrath of voters who understandably resent tax increases imposed to pay for current budget expenses and improvident spending. The downside to bonding abuse is that current expenses are carried into the future, a benefit for cowardly politicians charged to the future generation on a “buy now pay later” plan.

Bonding puts off until the day after tomorrow payment for obligations that ought to be met today by those responsible for incurring debts.

Bonding for current expenses was one of Mr. Malloy’s bêtes noire when he was running for the governor’s office, and a change from a modified cash basis system to a Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) system was the candidate’s answer to budgetary skulduggery that had led to unmanageable budget deficits.

Pointing to the delinquencies of his two Republican predecessors, Mr. Malloy was compelled, he said, to institute the largest tax increase in Connecticut history, second only to the tax increase that followed Governor Lowell Weicker’s income tax. Requiring revenues under GAAP to be counted in the year they are received necessarily created a budget differential of some $1.2 billion. Initially, Mr. Malloy had planned to bridge the gap through budgetary savings. The recovery that Panglossian Democrats in the General Assembly hoped might flood the state’s treasury with sufficient funds to pay down the differential never materialized, and Mr. Malloy now has decided to pay down the $1.2 billion gap through bonding. The funds generated through bonding will be dedicated to this purpose unless, according to one news account, “there’s an emergency,” in which case the money may be used for some other purpose following a three-fifths vote in the Democratic dominated General Assembly. It is not unheard of for governors in Connecticut to declare budget emergencies. 

During the fag end of the last legislative session, the Democratic dominated General Assembly ordered Connecticut State Treasurer Denise Nappier to borrow $750 million to facilitate the conversion to GAAP.  The decision to borrow rather than saving the money to pay down the differential will cost the state more than $200 million in interest over the life of the bonds.

The Malloy bonds naturally “improved” the state’s cash flow and, for the first time in many moons – prior to the elections too -- state Comptroller Kevin Lembo was able to predict a small budget surplus.  Cash flow is improved whenever taxes are increased or bonding is used to generate funds that are not made available in a depressed economy.

No political skullduggery here – just business as usual in a state addicted to chronic spending.

On the Republican side of the political barricades, Mr. Malloy’s decision to pay for the  differential by bonding rather than by the means he had first settled upon – save money in the state’s piggy bank and use it to convert to GAAP – produced  a forceful objection from Republican Party gubernatorial hopeful  John McKinney.

“Appropriating real dollars to reduce the state’s GAAP deficit,” Mr. McKinney said, “would have been an honest and direct way of dealing with the problem, and I would have supported those efforts. But that’s not what the governor is doing. Instead, he is borrowing in order to kick that commitment down the road another two years.”

For Democrats, GAAP has become the equivalent of a budget chastity belt. However, it is never an adjustable belt that assures chastity. A chastened big spender would understand that budget deficits are caused by the disposition to spend. And there is little or no acknowledgement among members of Connecticut’s spending class that spending must be curtailed or that excessive regulation – which always drives up business costs – must be pared back. Everywhere, big spenders await the “rising tide that will lift all the boats,” an expression employed by President John Kennedy in his well-known speech to the Economic Club of New York in 1962, in the course of which Mr. Kennedy said:

 “The final and best means of strengthening demands among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system – and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963.”

Mr. Malloy has instead used what little money he found in Connecticut’s debt ridden budget to advance a destructive crony capitalist program, which involves giving rare tax dollars to companies he bribes for the pleasure of doing business in the state, including profitable mega-companies or smaller companies that use abused taxpayers to finance their moves from one town to another.

Lifting all the boats is not a progressive specialty, and it is doubtful that John Kennedy could be elected dog catcher circa 2014 anywhere in progressive, crony capitalist Connecticut.

And Now, the Campaign

Almost immediately after Governor Dannel Malloy and Democrats in the General Assembly had put their budget to bed, a Hartford paper noted that however much lipstick Democrats put on the budget porker it was in many important respects still a pig.

Another media resource noted that while the governor had indicated he had been faithful to his earlier promise to hold the line on taxes – but not, tellingly, on spending – the new budget, Mr. Malloy’s second, placed new limits on tax credits, extended expiring taxes, boosted the gasoline tax 4 cents per gallon, drained from the transportation fund $120 million collected at the pumps during the last two years, depositing the money targeted for transportation needs into the general fund, resorted to $550 million worth of fund raids to plug holes in the budget, borrowed about two thirds of the $1.2 billion necessary to convert to a GAAP accounting system and shifted a little more than $6 billion of Medicaid spending from a constitutional capped budget so as to draw down an otherwise embarrassing deficit. 

And so the budget session ended -- in magic tricks of a kind once derided by Mr. Malloy and the Malloyalists.

On to the campaign.

The first campaign pitch of the season was delivered by Mr. Malloy at the close of the session. The closing session of the General Assembly usually ends with a love fest among incumbent legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, who fetch from it bragging rights useful to them in upcoming campaigns.

This year was different, frostier some have noted. Those who pay for the legislative bills may want to applaud the last day of the legislative session. Mark Twain, were he alive – and even dead he is livelier than most people in Connecticut who write about politicians – certainly would have reason to rejoice. It was Twain who said “No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

On the last day of the legislative session, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that Connecticut had come in dead last among the 50 states in economic growth, a measure of the combined total of goods, services and salaries, the state’s equivalent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Connecticut’s Gross State Product (GSP) fell by 1 percent in both 2011 and 2012, the only state in the nation that had experienced such a dip as well as a painful downward revision from last year’s estimate of 2 percent growth.

Democrats pronounced their budget plan a success and loudly patted themselves on the back, brushing aside a report from the state’s non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis that had projected, only moments after the General Assembly adjourned, a $712 million gap in the first year of Connecticut’s new budget. Mr. Malloy, whose budgets have consistently been short by hundreds of millions of dollars, pointed out that the economy was not static but dynamic: “They're predicting deficits assuming that all conditions remain the same. I think what we've shown fairly broadly in this administration is that conditions don't remain the same. We're eliminating waste. We have numbers built in the budget that in fact do that."

Ah yes -- the numbers.

Comptroller Kevin Lembo this year submitted to the General Assembly a bill that would throw windows open on the numbers and expose to public view the hundreds of millions of dollars the state spends every year in economic assistance and tax credits putatively designed to promote economic development and job growth. His legislation, the Comptroller said, “would have established key transparency and open government measures related to these dollars.” Although Mr. Lembo’s sunshine bill survived the House, it died from inattention on the floor of the Senate, crushed by the forces of darkness in the General Assembly that prefer a gloaming in which numbers might more efficiently be fudged. Mr. Lembo, it should be mentioned, is the only Democrat in state government whose numbers have been consistently correct.

When legislative gate keepers Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams and Majority Leader Martin Looney were asked why they didn't call the bill for a vote, “Williams and Looney,” Jon Lender of the Hartford Courant reported, “mentioned a number of factors, including time, lack of an urgent need, and what they characterized as only lukewarm support by the office of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.”

When politicians find they cannot control the course of events, they more strenuously seek to control the flow of information, the better to create politically palatable fictional narratives – sometimes called campaigns. In a state in which competing parties have been neutered, fictional campaign talking points are rarely effectively rebutted by a somnolent politically compromised media. Some few reporters in the state stand out as exceptions that prove this rule, but there are far too few of them.   

The state Republican Party enjoyed two brief bright moments of bipartisan conviviality a short time ago when Republican votes were needed to pass a gun restriction law. The two parties came together a second time when Mr. Malloy needed Republican assistance in plugging an ever recurring hole in his first budget during a special session. After this bright dot of bipartisan sunshine, both the governor and Democratic legislative leaders, brought down the now familiar iron curtain when, for the second time, Republicans were shooed out of the room during budget negotiations.

The doleful Bureau of Economic Analysis report is more than a report; it is a marker of the state’s destiny. And the state’s swollen budget is also a directional marker. Budget wise, the state has returned to 1991, the date at which a state income tax was implemented to put Connecticut on a firm and permanent economic footing. Because spending has tripled since that auspicious date, the foundation has given way. The state is progressing backwards. Our destiny points downward, the usual direction of a one party operation. Darkness, secrecy, shady backroom dealings and the politics of the shadows has always followed in the uncontested rut of the one party state.

Malloy in Bethel

Governor Malloy appeared in Bethel to defend his educational reform proposals, and the going was not quite as rough as Mr. Malloy’s past appearances.

At Wilber Cross High School, the heckling, mostly from teachers, was blistering. Towards the end of the meeting in New Haven, union president David Cicarella conceded, according to one press report, “It doesn't do any good hooting and hollering at the guy.” Teacher unions have not conceded much to Mr. Malloy concerning his proposals to remake education in Connecticut.

Rhetorical grapeshot was fired in Bethel, but Mr. Malloy easily deflected it, perhaps because Bethel Superintendent Kevin Smith had advised the crowd to be on their best behavior, but possibly, as I like to think, because Bethelites are unusually cordial.

My wife and I lived in Bethel – the name means “house of God” – for eight peaceful and fruitful years, not very far from the brilliant white church where P.T. Barnum’s father, Philo, and his mother, Irena, rest in peace beneath the sod. On the occasion of the unveiling of a fountain given by the then famous showman to his home town, Mr. Barnum said:

“Among all the varied scenes of an active and eventful life, crowded with strange incidents of struggle and excitement, of joy and sorrow, taking me often through foreign lands and bringing me face to face with the King in his palace and the peasant in his turf-covered hut, I have invariably cherished with most affectionate remembrance the place of my birth, the old village meeting house, without steeple or bell, where in its square family pew I sweltered in summer and shivered through my Sunday-school lessons in winter, and the old schoolhouse where the ferule, the birchen rod and rattan did active duty, and which deserved and received a liberal share.”

Mr. Barnum is a much underrated character. He first discovered then exploited and entertained the Middle Class. Mayor of Bridgeport and a legislator, Mr. Barnum was an able politician and as humorous and fetching a storyteller as Mark Twain:

"When I was but ten years old, newspapers came only once a week. The man who brought us the week's papers came up from Norwalk, and drove through this section with newspapers for subscribers and pins and needles for customers. He was called Uncle Silliman. I can remember well his weekly visit through Bethel, and his queer cry. On coming to a house or village he would shout, 'News! News! The Lord reigns!' One time he passed our schoolhouse when a snowstorm was prevailing. He shouted: 'News! News! The Lord reigns - and snows a little.'”

The crowd that listened on that day to the 71 year-old Barnum would have appreciated the subtle humor: The same “Uncle Silliman” who delivered the news supplied his customers with “pins and needles.” Newspapers during Barnum’s day were somewhat prickley, and the birched Bethelites who heard him were much less schooled and more educated than their modern counterparts in some of the underperforming urban schools Mr. Malloy is attempting to reform, apparently without the consent of unions.

Whether it was because the Lord reigned in Bethel or because the teachers of Mr. Barnum’s day made liberal use of birch rods, pretty much everyone who attended school in his home town could read the rare newspapers Mr. Silliman distributed. Mr. Barnum later exploited their literacy by drawing crowds of people into his Circus through ads; in addition to inventing the Middle Class, Mr. Barnum is also the father of modern advertising. It may shock newsreaders who have bought into the so-called “objective reporting” of journalists to learn that some the news stories covering Mr. Barnum’s educational lyceums were written by Mr. Barnum. It was not uncommon in those days for newspaper editors to accept for publication “stories” written by the subjects covered in the stories, their authorship disguised by false by-lines.

It is not at all surprising that Mr. Malloy has not been able to sell his reforms to unionized teachers. The reforms proposed by Mr. Malloy will, after all, change their world. And Mr. Malloy, somewhat like an overbearing teacher, is insisting that a no-excuse pedagogy should not fall back on the usual palliatives: We must eliminate poverty before we can educate urban students; the fault lies with broken families, drug addiction, gangs, disruptive students and other social pathologies, certainly not with dedicated teachers; give us smaller classes; we need longer school years; end standardized testing; give us more money -- pass around the birch rods.

Mr. Barnum, whose unique talents perfectly fitted him for a modern world full of politics and showmanship, had much the easier time of it.

Teddy And Barack

In a campaign stump speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1910 “new nationalism” speech, President Barack Obama threw a few flowers in the direction of the “roughrider,” the father of the modern progressive movement. And then the president bestowed on the Bull Moose president the ultimate compliment: He compared himself – slyly, indirectly – to Teddy.

Mark Twain, who thought Roosevelt a shameless fraud, was not so kind. Here is Twain erupting in a letter to the New York Times, written in 1908:

“Astronomers assure us that the attraction of gravitation on the surface of the sun is twenty-eight times as powerful as is the force at the earth's surface, and that the object which weights 217 pounds elsewhere would weight 6,000 pounds there.

“For seven years this country has lain smothering under a burden like that, the incubus representing, in the person of President Roosevelt, the difference between 217 pounds and 6,000. Thanks be we got rid of this disastrous burden day before yesterday, at last. Forever? Probably not. Probably for only a brief breathing spell, wherein, under Mr. Taft, we may hope to get back some of our health - four years. We may expect to have Mr. Roosevelt sitting on us again, with his twenty-eight times the weight of any other Presidential burden that a hostile Providence could impose upon us for our sins.

“Our people have adored this showy charlatan as perhaps no impostor of his brood has been adored since the Golden Calf, so it is to be expected that the Nation will want him back again after he is done hunting other wild animals heroically in Africa, with the safeguard and advertising equipment of a park of artillery and a brass band.”

In another piece on the bank panic of November 1907, Mr. Twain noted that the nation had been saved at the last moment by the millionaires Mr. Roosevelt had been excoriating in his campaign stump speeches:

"Last week a prodigious and universal crash was impending and but for one thing would have happened; the millionaire 'bandits' whom the president is so fond of abusing in order to get the applause of the gallery, stepped in and stayed the desolation. Mr. Roosevelt promptly claimed the credit of it, and there is much evidence that this inebriated nation thinks he is entitled to it.”

Weiner And The Etiquette Of Admission

The first rule is this: If you are going to put yourself through the trouble of admission, no qualifiers will be allowed. You cannot say, “Yes, it is true that I allowed my bachelor’s pad in Washington D.C. to be used by an acquaintance as a bordello servicing both gay and straight clients, but…

A “but” is a backdoor exit to your national humiliation and will not escape the notice of the usually soporific mainstream media, which tends to be more forgiving of so called “sins of the flesh” committed by Democrats such as U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, an out of the closet gay guy who, several years ago, provided one of his friends the opportunity to frolic with his clients in his Washington D.C. bordello. Mr. Frank was exposed by the frothing right wing media. The exposure, however, put no serious dent in the congressman’s bumper; and, after a few months, Mr. Frank was permitted to get along with his congressional business, joining former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now a Hollywood mogul, in imposing strangling regulations on American businesses during a recession that Democrats had hoped would elide into a mini-depression, the better to save the country through FDR-like public works programs.

The second rule is this: Don’t weep, don’t cringe, and don’t drag your long suffering wife – or, in Mr. Frank’s case, partner – into your sordid affairs. If your wife, partner, paramour refuses to stand by you in your hour of trial, try to accept the rebuff with a tortured but understanding smile.

The third rule is this: If you plead guilty publicly to untoward behavior – fetchingly kicking a foot in the next stall in a men’s room, little realizing that the gent sitting on the toilet beside you is a vice cop; or producing a child out of wedlock with your mistress while running as Vice President of the United States; or confessing, better late than never, to your faithful wife that you had produced a child ten years earlier with one of the servants; or, as in the case with the much humiliated Anthony Weiner of New York, sending erotic twitters here and there, accompanied with graphic pictures – inflict upon yourself a suitable penance.

And the fourth and final rule is this: So behave in life and with others that your mom and dad, diseased or living, may not be embarrassed by your self indulgent stupidity, in this life or the next.

Mr. Weiner violated all these rules, as well as the overarching rule stressed by Mark Twain, humorist and social philosopher: A man, said Mr. Twain, may commit numerous breaches of the law and yet get away with all these, particularly if he is a politician or person of means who has in hand a good lawyer; but let a man commit one offense against convention – and he is a goner. There is no hope for him.

Proceeding backwards through the rules:

1) Considering Mr. Weiner’s public confession, it is likely that he is incapable of making the proper distinction between illegalities that may be got round and conventions that cannot be hurtled. It is true that modernity has thrown to the dogs many of the conventions that might have inhibited our parents; a certain amount of confusion may therefore be tolerated. On the other hand, Mr. Weiner is not a man easily confused and, at least in respect to conservative conventions, he has been pointedly intolerant.

2) Mr. Weiner, having confessed to his sins, refrained from imposing a suitable penance upon himself. He will not give up his office. And he has challenged such moral adepts as Nancy Pelosi to bring on the Grand Inquisitors. Go ahead, set the dogs of the House Ethics Committee upon me – just go ahead. One prominent Democrat suggested that former President Bill Clinton, who had in the past an unfortunate brush with White House convention, might have a word with Mr. Weiner and encourage his speedy exit.

3) Mr. Weiner wept, cringed and brought his innocent wife into the affair.

4) Mr. Weiner’s apology was decorated with “buts,” some subtly implied. For instance, Mr. Weiner said he had sent to a complete stranger a picture showing a bulge below his pelvis “… as a joke.” One commentator groused that he wondered whether Mr. Weiner’s wife would have considered that twitter funny. Possibly not.

Andrew Brietbart, the Publisher of Big Government who outed Mr. Weiner’s frat house behavior, has now said he possesses a picture sent by Mr. Weiner to yet another female stranger showing Mr. Weiner showing off his wiener. From delicacy and pity, Mr. Brietbart has said, he would not release the picture. But in these days of twitter and facebooks, there are WikiLeakers crouching behind every bush, waiting to waylay unconventional congressmen such as Mr. Weiner with promises of blackmail: “Halt there Weiner – your favors or your life!”

A final reason why Mr. Weiner should leave politics behind, repair his bruised marriage, and get a real job in the real world – like Mr. Dodd.

Blumenthal to Courant: Bug Off!

John Lender, the Hartford Courant’s investigative reporter, caught a "mislead" on the part of Attorney General Richard Blumenthal in information he had provided for a biographical listing in the annual Martindale-Hubble Law Directory of attorneys at private law firms.

Summarizing his military service, Blumenthal offered: “With USMC [U.S. Marine Corp], active duty and reserve. 1970-1976.”

In Lender’s Sunday “Government Watch” column, an opinion on the misstatement was solicited from Randall Collins of Waterford, a Vet whose “active duty” included a stretch in Vietnam in the late 60’s.

"’I think [active duty] was probably put in there to be misleading, based on all these other things,’ said Randall H. Collins of Waterford, who served in Vietnam in the late 1960s in the U.S. Army military intelligence division. An unaffiliated voter, Collins, 65, who is Waterford's superintendent of schools, is in the Connecticut Veterans Hall of Fame, established in 2005 to honor those who served honorably and ‘continue to serve and inspire their fellow man.’

"’I was repulsed by his comments’ in the 2008 videotaped speech, said Collins. ‘I consider it a lie, not a misstatement.’

"As to the Martindale-Hubbell entry, he said: ‘I think it's both accurate and misleading: It's true that boot camp [training] is considered active duty,’ Collins said, ‘but when people think of active duty, they think of something longer than six months…. They think of a longer period of time’ of ‘full-time’ military service – not part-time reserve status in this country for six years with weekend duty once a month, and two-week drills in the summer.

"’It's hard to say it's not technically accurate,’ Collins said. ‘I really think it would be insignificant if it weren't for the comments he made publicly about his duty. But when you contextualize it in a pattern, it becomes a little more suspicious. Rightly or wrongly, you read into his motivation of why he put it there.’"

Lender’s report was what is called in the business “balanced.”

Another Vietnam vet, Jack Dougherty of Branford, was quoted in the report as saying:

“’At that time, the reservists and the guys who were going to be there forever and ever were side by side in the same, exact boot camp,’ said Dougherty, who works as a mechanical engineer and is an unaffiliated voter. Dougherty said that the reservists ‘served their active duty for six months. The balance would be … reserve status,’ with periodic activities such as drills.

“Asked what he thought of the recent disclosures about Blumenthal's misstatements, Doughterty said, ‘I'm not bent around the axle about it like some people are.’ He said, ‘I don't know if he misspoke in the past,’ but ‘my personal opinion is that he's a nice guy and does a great job in the category we find him in,’ as attorney general."

Another Marine, Bob Janick, was in a forgiving mood:

“Another member of the Veterans Hall of Fame, Marine Corps Vietnam veteran Bob Janicki of Guilford, said that he has ‘struggled for years with imposters,’ and noted that recently he'd said after Blumenthal's apology, ‘I don't forgive him.’

“But now, Janicki, 63, a Republican voter who works for the federal Veterans Administration, said he is writing a letter to newspaper editors about a conversation he had since then with Blumenthal. Part of it says: ‘Mr. Blumenthal shared with me his personal feelings on what he may have said over the years, and I truly feel that he was honestly sincere, and I believe him. Personally I am not about to go back in time and review every quote presented by the media. I will never trust them, to determine if they were in context or taken out of context.’"

Lender wanted to probe Blumenthal’s opinion on all this. In the past, Blumenthal never had been hesitant in sharing his opinion concerning cases he was prosecuting with the state’s media. In fact, his press releases over the 20 year period Blumenthal served as attorney general, bundled together, would make a hefty package that Blumenthal spokeswoman and advisor Marla Romash, who used to write for the Courant, would have a tough time bench pressing.

Romash brushed him off: “The Courant had asked to interview Blumenthal, but Romash returned the call and responded to questions, saying, ‘He's addressed all these issues.’"

Over in Torrington, the Torrington Register Citizen reports, Blumenthal left a public stage with his pants on fire rather than submitting to the indignity of a few questions.

And what was it, anyway, Lender wanted to ask the suddenly camera shy Blumenthal?

Lender, who does his homework, notes:

“The 1991 volume of the who's-who-style directory of lawyers in private practice was the last of seven or so annual editions covering Blumenthal's time from 1984 to 1990 as a partner in the Stamford law firm of Silver Golub & Teitell; that was his last job before winning the 1990 election for attorney general and assuming office in January 1991. Earlier editions of the directory worded Blumenthal's military history one word differently — with the word "in" instead of "and," as follows: ‘With USMC., active duty in reserve, 1970-1976.’ Romash had no explanation for that difference.”

Gotta watch those prepositions. Mark Twain used to say that “the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and a lightning bolt.”

It was not a lightning bug that struck Blumenthal when the said at least five times that he had served in Vietnam.

Twain, by the way, would have had no difficulty distinguishing between a lie and a misspeak. Pity he is not writing commentary for the Hartford Courant.