Gets By Buckner

The fun never ends: an alert reader sends this link to a “Football Fans For Truth” item on John Kerry apparently having falsely claimed to have been at Shea Stadium for Game Six of the 1986 World Series, when he was apparently at a fundraiser in Boston that night (although he appears to have been at Game Seven two days later).
UPDATE: I should add a caution for new readers: not every story of a politician saying something that’s not true is (1) hugely significant or (2) proof the guy is lying. People forget stuff and embellish their own memories all the time. I don’t expect anybody to change their vote over this trivia; it’s mostly just funny. Still, (a) if baseball were all that important to Kerry . . . well, I sure know where I was for Game Six, and I’d particularly remember if I’d been there or not, and (b) what this suggests is less that Kerry is some sort of liar as that he’s a prototypical braggart, the guy who has to put himself at the center of things when he wasn’t. The type, of course, is a familiar one and all too prevalent in politics.
SECOND UPDATE (10/26): Kerry campaign says he flew to the game after the fundraiser; Thomas Galvin runs the timeline on this and finds it unlikely. I can’t speak to when the shuttle runs, but I can add a few points to Galvin’s analysis that suggest that Kerry’s account is not necessarily implausible:
1. Galvin discusses the game time; the game definitely ended after midnight; I vividly recall debating whether the 10th inning ended “before” the 9th and what the true end-of-game time was, because it was the night we set the clocks back (I know now you do that at 2am, not midnight).
2. Galvin includes 45 minutes for Kerry to get from from LaGuardia to Shea. You could walk there faster.
3. It’s not odd for VIPs like Kerry to fly around just to catch part of a game (or to duck early out of a fundraising dinner), especially if he thought it would end with the Sox ending their streak of defeats.
So, it may be that Kerry is telling the truth here.