Unfortunately for Mark Kirk, when he makes statements over the airwaves they get heard by the public at large. Yesterday, he appeared on conservative radio’s WLS-AM and got caught telling a few whoppers, while apparently being caught up in the partisan vapors.

Progress Illinois recorded the conversation for posterity and noted that Rep. Kirk was infopimping the already debunked “China is drilling off the coast of Cuba” lie that was all the conservative-partisans’ rage last week as the cons tried to push for drilling off the coast of the tourist-dependent Sunshine State. (They ought to talk to the president’s younger brother about why he, smartly, wouldn’t let the rigs drill off his state’s sun-filled shores).

This Cuba lie was so easily and so quickly debunked that even Vice President and former Big Oil CEO Dick Cheney had to eat his words within days. Apparently, Congressman Kirk didn’t get the memo to stop lying.

Now, why a guy who claims to believe in a clean environment and went to town for photo op after photo op when BP Amoco wanted to dump poison in our Lake Michigan drinking water would be advocating for drilling off Florida’s beaches is unclear and not the least bit hypocritical. If he can work to find Federal dollars for solar panels at schools, he ought to also be able to work for alternative fuels instead of mimicking the drill-drill-drill lemmings.

A bit later in that same radio program, Progress Illinois also noted that Mark Kirk repeated the oft-heard ‘mistake’ that seems to plague conservative-partisans: swapping the names of “Osama” and “Obama”.

Rep. Kirk did rightly apologize publicly and to Sen. Obama as soon as the ‘error’ was pointed out, but even worse is the fact that he was bald-faced lying while talking about Obama’s stated positions on Osama bin Laden. To wit (via PI):

DON WADE: In fact, yesterday in a conference call, Barack Obama’s advisers were asked, “If Osama bin Laden were caught, should he get to challenge his detention in U.S. courts?” And the advisers said that — should that right to challenge detention that they get at Gitmo based on the Supreme Court ruling, should that be applied to bin Laden? — and Obama’s advisers said, “Yes.”

KIRK: Yeah, and I would much rather have a policy where if we see Obama there’s a shoot-on-sight order.

That, unfortunately, was only half of what the Obama camp has discussed regarding bin Laden.

The rest of the story actually comes pretty close to precisely what Kirk was advocating. From Nedra Pickler of the AP:

“First of all, I think there is an executive order out on Osama bin Laden’s head,” the Illinois senator said at a news conference. “And if I’m president, and we have the opportunity to capture him, we may not be able to capture him alive.”

Obama’s campaign said he was referring to a classified Memorandum of Notification that President Clinton approved in 1998 – revealed in the 9/11 Commission report – that would allow the CIA to kill bin Laden if capture weren’t feasible.

Obama said he wouldn’t discuss what approach he would take to bring bin Laden to justice if he were apprehended. But he said the Nuremberg trials for the prosecution of Nazi leaders are an inspiration because the victors acted to advance universal principles and set a tone for the creation of an international order.

“What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he’s engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism,” Obama said.

It’s unfortunate that the WLS hosts were so ill-informed but hopefully this is clear enough for Rep. Kirk and he’ll stop repeating his fibs and half-truths.

Or does Mark Kirk not believe in Truth, Justice and the American Way?