When you get up to ten pretty significant lies about military service, you know more has to be there. And here it is:
On the floor of the House, in campaign commercials and during interviews, Mr. Kirk has invoked his experience in the classroom. At a speech this spring to the Illinois Education Association, Mr. Kirk declared, “as a former nursery school and middle school teacher, I know some of what it takes to bring order to class.”
A review of public comments that Mr. Kirk has made over the last decade shows that while he may refer to himself as a former teacher, he does not talk about the brevity of his experience: a year in London at a private school and part-time in a nursery school as part of a work-study program while he was a student at Cornell University.
The campaign says he worked part time in the nursery at a United Methodist ministry called Forest Home Chapel in Ithaca, N.Y, but the Times was unable to get that "independently confirmed." He did teach for a year at Milestone College, a private prep school in London. Giving him the benefit of the doubt on the nursery school thing, a little over a year teaching does qualify him as a one-time educator. But working part-time in a church nursery school doesn't necessarily make him experienced on the American school system.
Which, of course, he is based on that experience.
In a House Budget Committee hearing five years earlier, shortly after Mr. Kirk arrived in Congress, he talked about his time as “a teacher, both nursery and middle school.” He added, “I did leave the teaching profession, but if we had addressed some of the teacher development issues, which I want to raise with you, I might have stayed.”
But here's the best one:
In a speech on the House floor on Sept. 19, 2006, as he talked about school safety, Mr. Kirk spoke about “the kids who were the brightest lights of our country’s future, and I also remember those who bore scrutiny as people who might bring a gun to class.”
Mr. Kirk declined an interview on Wednesday to talk about his time as a teacher. His spokeswoman said the congressman was referring to nursery school students in Ithaca, not his students in London, during that speech on the House floor in 2006.
Man, those Methodist pre-schoolers in Ithaca are bad ass!