This isn't some recent staff oopsie. Kirk's been claiming his award for years.

As pointed out today on Kos, Kirk is explaining his mischaracterization of the award he received for his 1999 service. We posted the award itself in the prior post.

There are several problems with Kirk's explanation. As Kos points out, no one can find evidence of the Rufus Taylor Intelligence Unit of the Year award. Let's just assume it exists. If so, Kirk's explanation confirms Carl's initial conclusion that the award was a unit and not Navy-wide award. {UPDATE: We've found the Rufus Taylor Intelligence award and it appears to be given by some sort of foundation and not the U.S Navy.}

The other problem is that the claim is not just a recent claim, a mistake on his Senate campaign website. It's been on his official congressional site for years and has been picked up by several other blogs and news sources over the years. Here are some examples of sites that have picked up the claim and ran with it over the years:

The Jewish Blog
American Chronicle
Michelle Malkin's comments
Asbarez--from the Armenian National Committee of America. Here too.
Picked up from Kirk's website by USNI
The Illinois GOP--I've take a screen shot in the event they scrub the page
Sourcewatch
NED
OpenCongress.
Flopping Aces
Center for American Progress
Real Clear Politics
His Wiki-- a piece written June 20, 2006
A 2006 post on Exiled from the GOP written by PSB and Kos blogger bored now
Backyard Conservative--took a screenshot
Who Runs Government
Students for Mark Kirk Facebook page--took a screenshot
Andrew Breitbart's Big Government
Cornell News
Institute for Corean-American Studies
Chicago Counsel on Global Affairs in describing a program in which Kirk was the speaker
The 21 Club announcing Kirk as a speaker at a March 2008 breakfast
China Conference Speaker biography from April 2005
(the list goes on and on, but I have dinner plans tonight)

Does Mark Kirk expect us to believe that all these people just made it up; that several unrelated sources made the same mistake over several years; that people printing speaker biographies for events made it up too? Of course not. Kirk and his people have been spreading the claim that Kirk won a Navy-wide award called "Intelligence Officer of the Year" for years. They had it on Kirk's official house site and they handed it out to supporters, reporters and groups in front of which he spoke for years.