It looks like another candidate has “pulled a Richard Blumenthal.” Illinois Republican congressman Mark Kirk, who is running for Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat in Illinois, has ‘fessed up to falsely claiming he won a prestigious military award. On numerous occasions (the first in a 2002 speech recorded by C-SPAN), Kirk said he was the recipient of the U.S. Navy’s “Intelligence Officer of the Year” award for his service during NATO’s conflict with Serbia in the late nineties. Just one minor issue: He, uh, never won it. When contacted by the Washington Post, who had learned of the error, Kirk’s spokesman Eric Elk offered only, “we found the award was misidentified and corrected the name.” [WP]
