Christine O'Donnell, self-aggrandizing liar

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This isn't part of our ongoing "Just how crazy is Christine O'Donnell?" series, though perhaps one could argue that it's pretty crazy to lie about your education on one of your social networking pages -- given how easy it is these days to check such things. The Post's Greg Sargent has the details:

In another move that will raise further questions about Christine O'Donnell's embellishment of her education record, she claims she studied at the University of Oxford -- but a look at her actual record shows this is at best an exaggeration and at worst an outright falsehood.

O'Donnell's LinkedIn bio page lists "University of Oxford" as one of the schools she attended, claiming she studied "Post Modernism in the New Millennium." But it turns out that was just a course conducted by an institution known as the Phoenix Institute, which merely rented space at Oxford.

What's more, the woman who oversaw Phoenix Institute's summer program at Oxford tells me O'Donnell's claim about studying at Oxford is "misleading."

Misleading is an understatement.

An O'Donnell spokesperson claims that it was "a course at Oxford overseen by the Phoenix Instutute," but according to Chris Fletcher, who ran the Institute's Oxford program, "It wasn't an official course of Oxford University. It wasn't sponsored by Oxford University. We rented the space... It was our curriculum, and we did the grades."

Which means that O'Donnell's claim -- and Sargent quotes the relevant section of her LinkedIn page -- is an utter lie meant to make herself look good. She may once have been in Oxford, in rented space, but she never studied at, was never a student at, Oxford.

Oh, and there's a pattern of lies here:

By itself, O'Donnell's Oxford claim might not matter too much. But the larger context is that O'Donnell has already been nabbed fudging her education record not once, but twice. She claimed for several years to have graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson Unversity, but she actually obtained her bachelor's degree last summer. And in a lawsuit she suggested she was trying for a Master's degree courses at Princeton -- but subsequently acknowledged she hadn't taken a single Princeton graduate course.

Three strikes, Ms. O'Donnell. You're busted.

(Though one wonders what else you've been lying about. These three blatant lies, after all, suggest a life of public and perhaps also private dishonesty, at least when it comes to shameless self-promotion.)