by David Safier
I guess 2 out of 3 ain't bad, especially when number 3 is from Arizona. I mean, what do you expect from the originators of the "Show me your papers" law? Contrition?
Richard Blumenthal said he served in Vietnam when he hadn't. It looks like he only said it that one time. He apologized.
Mark Kirk claimed on multiple occasions that he had been named Navy Intelligence Officer of the Year when he hadn't. He recanted, saying, "I simply misremembered it wrong." Let's forget the clumsiness of the phrasing, including the double negative which reverses the meaning. He apologized.
But our own Accidental Guv has upped her indignation to eleven and sworn her statement that her father "died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany" is not only absolutely correct — she maintains those words are a perfect representation of the war record of a man who was a civilian supervisor in a Nevada munitions plant and died 11 years later of complications from inhaling fumes at the plant — but anyone who says otherwise is defaming her father, somehow or other.
Come clean, Jan. You took something that happened in Dallas, where there was a caricature of you as Hitler's daughter — not in Arizona, in Dallas — and used the "daughter" image to refer back to a false portrait of you as the daughter of a man who died on the front lines during World War II. It was a carefully thought-out, public relations-shaped misstatement — you may call it a "misstatement" if you like, rather than a lie — to make the most of the trumped-up moment when your usually lizard-thick hide turned into the fragile petals of a hothouse flower.
Apologize. You screwed up, exaggerated your father's perfectly reputable job during WW II into something else and got caught. Own up.