Let's Compare The Plagiarism Crises Of Joe Biden And Rand Paul

Remember the big Joe Biden plagiarism crisis of 1988? I do. Like lazy plagiarists everywhere, let's get the Wikipedia summary:

While Biden's speech included the lines:

"I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? [Then pointing to his wife in the audience] Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?"

Biden had in fact cited Kinnock as the source for the formulation on previous occasions. But he made no reference to the original source at the August 23 Democratic debate at the Iowa State Fair being reported on, nor in an August 26 interview for the National Education Association. Moreover, while political speeches often appropriate ideas and language from each other, Biden's use came under more scrutiny because he fabricated aspects of his own family's background in order to match Kinnock's. Biden was soon found to have earlier that year lifted passages from a 1967 speech by Robert F. Kennedy (for which Biden aides took the blame) and a short phrase from the 1961 inaugural address of John F. Kennedy, and in two prior years to have done the same with a 1976 passage from Hubert H. Humphrey.

A few days later, Biden's plagiarism incident in law school came to public light. Video was also released showing that when earlier questioned by a New Hampshire resident about his grades in law school, Biden had stated that he had graduated in the "top half" of his class, that he had attended law school on a full scholarship, and that he had received three degrees in college, each of which were untrue or exaggerations of his actual record.

The Kinnock and school revelations were magnified by the limited amount of other news about the nomination race at the time, when most of the public were not yet paying attention to any of the campaigns; Biden thus fell into what The Washington Post writer Paul Taylor described as that year's trend, a "trial by media ordeal". Biden lacked a strong demographic or political group of support to help him survive the crisis. He withdrew from the nomination race on September 23, 1987, saying his candidacy had been overrun by "the exaggerated shadow" of his past mistakes.

After Biden withdrew from the race, it was revealed that the Dukakis campaign had secretly made a video highlighting the Biden–Kinnock comparison and distributed it to news outlets. Later in 1987, the Delaware Supreme Court's Board of Professional Responsibility cleared Biden of the law school plagiarism charges regarding his standing as a lawyer, saying Biden had "not violated any rules".

So, in 1988, Biden was accused of lifting flattering statements from those he admired, without attribution. He was forced to shelve his Presidential ambitions as a result.

In 2013, Rand Paul is accused of lifting pages and pages of material from Wikipedia and presenting them as his own thoughts. In response, Rand Paul has admitted not footnoting statements well, but as Chris Matthews noted last night on his "Hardball" show, no one has accused Rand Paul of footnoting improperly. Instead, people are accusing him of lifting pages and pages of material from Wikipedia and presenting them as his own thoughts:

It remains unclear if Paul is truly dumb or just incredibly brazen when he denies to this day that he ever plagiarized anyone. He insists that by crediting the source of the original works he’s describing – whether the movies “Gattaca” and “Stand and Deliver,” or think tank reports – he is inoculated from criticism for stealing the words of other people who summarized those works so he or his speechwriters didn’t have to.

Still, with his stubborn defensiveness, Paul also shows his contempt for both the written word and ideas themselves. He told the New York Times that he was maybe a little sloppy with footnotes because of the crushing “workload” of a busy freshman senator. Obviously he’s too busy and important doing real stuff to worry about the writing of his speeches, books or opinion pieces, and all the ink-stained wretches who care are just “haters.”

Too bad the Internet wasn't as comprehensive in 1988 as it is today. I'm sure you can just imagine what the Republicans were saying then about Joe Biden. And surely they must be saying the same things today about Rand Paul.



Crickets???