Okay, I’m especially pissed after I gave him some leeway on the issue of being a pre-school teacher and he turned out not to be, so take this as someone who feels a bit taken…
He had to be thinking to make up some of this..
On embellishments:
“I wasn’t thinking.”
On his teaching career — did he misspeak?
Doesn’t agree that he did. Says he was referring to high school kids at his school.
Apparently Mark Kirk saw those preschoolers as pretty mean little bastards:
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.
Private British Prepatory Schools also taught him a lot about teacher development in the United States:
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.”
Mr. Kirk left Milestone College in 1983 and began working on the staff of an Illinois congressman, John Porter, the following year and did not return to teaching.
Well, no, he was thinking and he was making stuff up. To a certain point this press conference will reduce the heat on him, but if more comes out–as any smart oppo team would hold back some for after he has the mea culpa, this will all start to come back and come back harder.