You know, the “I cannot tell a lie” thing (which never actually happened). Anyway. Congressman Mark Kirk, a Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois, is starting to out-Blumenthal Richard Blumenthal, after it was discovered last week that he’d never won the Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award in 1999 as he’d claimed over and over through the years. (Kirk says he meant to refer to an award bestowed on his unit, the “Vice Admiral Rufus L. Taylor Award.”) To be fair, they sound almost exactly the same!
To make matters worse, Kirk then claimed that staffers noticed the error on their own, but a military spokesman claims that the Navy’s office of legislative affairs called Kirk, after media inquiries, to notify him that someone else had won the Intelligence Officer of the Year award in 1999. Now Kirk’s campaign says they were already looking into Kirk’s record when the Navy called. Wow, crazy timing on that one.
U.S. Navy alerted Kirk to questions about his military award [Clout Street/Chicago Tribune]
Kirk Re-Explains His Explanation [Live Shots/Fox News]
