Mark Kirk, your opponent is the scion of a failed mob bank who has never worked an honest job in his life, and you’ve got a solid chance to flip President Obama’s seat in the middle of his first term.
And then you go all Dick Blumenthal on us:
Mark Kirk’s Senate campaign has now acknowledged a second misrepresentation of his service record, admitting to me that his Web site falsely claimed that he was “the only member of Congress to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
This latest admission comes after Kirk, an Illinois Congressman, recently admitted that his official bio had falsely claimed he’d been named U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award for his service in NATO’S war with Serbia in the 1990s.
. . .Kirk actually served stateside in the Navy reserves during the Iraq War.
Worse, the Kirk camp refused to address or apologize for the lies, and when they finally did they employed the same “I got my prepositions mixed up” defense that made Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal look so disingenuous last month:
Kirk’s 2005 campaign Web site noted this correctly. Unfortunately, the official Web site listed the word “in” instead of “during” but was corrected in 2005.
There are some distinctions to be made between Blumenthal and Kirk, though. Unlike Blumenthal, who misrepresented his own service in speeches, the misstatements about Kirk’s record were made by staff members. And most of the errors were corrected years ago.
Still, this will be a campaign issue, and rightly so.