Almost a month to the day after publishing its much-ballyhooed and then quickly-fizzling hit piece on Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's description of his military service, The New York Times is back with a new article claiming that Blumenthal has “raised more questions about that chapter of his life.”

How did Blumenthal raise those questions? Apparently, Blumenthal said in an interview with the Connecticut Mirror that he thought when he joined the Marine Corps Reserve in 1970 that he “could be called up.” The Times reports that by contrast, “military experts said there was no expectation that reserve units would be activated at the time Mr. Blumenthal enlisted.”

Do you follow that? Blumenthal says that he thought he "could" be called up. “Military experts” say now that there was “no expectation” that he would be called up. The Times is clearly trying to suggest a contradiction here where none exists. The Times also provides no evidence that Blumenthal is being dishonest when he states that he thought he could be sent to Vietnam as a reservist.

The rest of the article doesn't get much better.

The Times also reports that in the interview, Blumenthal “said that he did not remember the number he got in the draft lottery but that it was probably high enough to keep him out of the draft” in 1970, but that in fact, it was not. The Times cites a college professor who served in Vietnam saying he finds it “hard to believe that anyone would forget their lottery number.”

But the Times leaves out a piece of information cited by the Mirror that seems to thoroughly undermine its point:

At the time he enlisted, Blumenthal was an aide in the Nixon White House, working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a professor from his undergraduate days at Harvard. Previously, he worked as a personal assistant to Katharine Graham, the publisher of Washington Post, a job that did not qualify for a deferral.

[...]

Regardless of his lottery number, Blumenthal said his White House job would have kept him from the draft.

“I could have stayed in the White House and continued the deferment,” Blumenthal said. “I did not want to avoid service. I did realize reservists could be called up, and that it was something I wanted to do.”

If Blumenthal had a White House job that qualified him for a deferment, then joined the Marine Corps, which also made him exempt from the draft, why would he remember his draft number? Wouldn't that be four-decade-old information that had never actually been important to him?

The Times, attempting to puff up its discredited month-old story, also rather obnoxiously claims that Blumenthal “sought to play down the instances in which he inaccurately described his military service, saying it was a ” 'very limited' number of occasions." Given that the Times and other outlets have only been able to point to a handful of such instances in a decades-long career in public life, that characterization simply seems accurate.

By the way, the Times still has yet to provide a serious, critical examination of Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon. But we're sure that one's coming any day now.