Memo to Illinois' Republican senatorial candidate Mark Kirk: CSPAN has archives.
On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that:
The Republican candidate for President Obama's old Senate seat has admitted to inaccurately claiming he received the U.S. Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year award for his service during NATO's conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.
Naturally, it was some sort of clerical error:
In a message on his blog, Kirk wrote that "upon a recent review of my records, I found that an award listed in my official biography was misidentified" and that the award he had intended to list was given to his unit, not to him individually.
It was just an honest mistake, could happen to anyone, nothing to see here, move along ... or not:
I've been in office just one year. Before that I was a Navy Reserve Intelligence Officer--was the Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year in 1998.
And as Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post points out:
What is striking about Rep. Kirk's assertion in the video is that it appears scripted and thought out, which belies Kirk's recent defense that the false claim on his website -- that was only removed last week after a Washington Post investigation -- regarding the award was little more than an administrative oversight.
We anxiously await wall-to-wall cable TV coverage and a front page story in the New York Times ...