Carol Marin Has Kirk's Number and Kirk Still Shamelessly Lied to Her

Carol Marin interviewed Kirk yesterday on City Desk. Her questions were telling:

CM: The funny thing is in your campaign ads you don't say you're a Republican and you say you wanted to push back from President Bush. Is George Bush a problem for you in your district?

CM: According to the website GovTrack.com, you've sponsored 73 bills, 69 haven't made it out of committee, and none has been successfully enacted. Why not?

CM: In your district, I'm curious about the war, because initially supported the war. Do you regret that support, and has that been a big issue in your district?

He lied to her in several places. He tried to give himself a fake bill passage record. He lied again claiming independence from Bush when we know he's sided with Bush about 88% of the time. He also lied about the bailout that he recently helped pass claiming it "banned pay for failed CEOs and burned golden parachutes." We know it left existing pay rates and golden parachutes in place. In any event, the worst lie is the one that actually killed people:

MK: Well there was faulty intelligence, and I served in the intelligence community for 18 years, and there are times when we have to make a judgment, and estimate. The intelligence community had a colossal failure in 1941, when it missed Pearl Harbor. Another failure when it missed 9/11. And another in Iraq. There is time when you've got to make a judgment call against an enemy or country that's hiding what it says. Right now we're dealing with the subject of Iran. The intelligence community right now says they are not building a nuclear weapon.

Despite what he said in his desperate attempt to be reelected, we know Kirk was one of 9 congressment chosen by the Bush Administration to sell the Iraq war in Congress. At the time Kirk made the sales pitch, the Administration knew the Niger claim was questionable. Kirk was in the inner circle and likely knew that the intelligence was being fixed around the policy. Kirk also sold himself to the district as an expert with insider information. He told us he personally knew there were WMD in Iraq.

Than the conversation just got wierd and Marin got a look on her face reminicient of the one Amy Poehler used in the skit wherein she played Katie Couric with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin:

CM: Are you confident in their intelligence of their intelligence misled you in the war in Iraq?

MK: Well you've got to check them—

CM: How do you do that? I mean the government does check. People at the highest levels do check.

MK: In the end, remember, we don't need an intelligence community of $30 billion to tell us what's on the cover of the Chicago Tribune. That costs under a buck. What we need is an intelligence community that tells us what countries are spending hundred s of billions of dollars to hide. Right now the Iranians are hiding a lot of what they're doing.

CM: No I understand that, but how do you make sure the intelligence you're getting is correct?

MK: You have to have a very jaundiced eye. For example with new threats like the emergence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan or what the Iranians are doing. You've got to broaden what you're reading. So for example, instead of relying on the CIA and what they tell us, we're relying heavily on the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency and what it says. Because they were right about Iraq, and I think they're highly influential now about what they tell us about Iran.

If it doesn't make sense, it probably isn't true and this surely does not make sense because we already knew about al Quaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan long before 9/11. As for his comment about broadening what you're reading, he fails to mention that the paper entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US wasn't as high on his Administration's reading list as My Pet Goat. The Bush administration and Mark Kirk repeatedly put down the UN and now they love it. Kirk's really saying that it's all about what the republican party feels like pushing as its war product of the week and who's willing to play ball.

With everything that has happened, why would this district tolerate a congressman who lies to us?