Sen. Rand Paul has a plagiarism problem. After allegations that he lifted enough text to fill three pages of his recent book and copied text for an article The Washington Times from a week old article in The Week, Sen. Paul went on the defensive:
We write something every week for The Washington Times, and I literally am riding around in a car in between things trying to figure out if I can approve it. . . . We need to get stuff earlier, but it’s hard, we probably take on more than we should be doing.
Being a politician is hard? Citing sources is hard? Buying food when your SNAP benefits have been cut is hard?
Oh wait, one of these things is actually hard.
Douche.
Also on today’s #TWiBRadio, #TeamBlackness discussed the new mayor-elect of New York City, anti-rape underpants,
and apparently, it’s lethal to seek help after a car accident . . . if you’re a person of color.
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And this morning on #amTWiB, The Morning Crew weighed in on Tuesday’s elections, bullying forces a biracial girl to change her name, and I introduce some “Good Morning” cheer.
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Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Rand Paul can’t be expected to read everything he pretends to write.
Litlebritdiftrnt
I am going to be off the grid for a week as I fly home tomorrow for my mum’s 80th birthday. It is a bitter sweet trip, due to the costs and not being able to take time off it is probably the last time I will see my mum and more than likely the last time I will get to go to England until her funeral. Still, I am not going to think about that. I am going to enjoy myself. I am going to start eating the minute my flight lands at Manchester Airport (Full English Breakfast) and not stop eating until it takes off again a week later (Fish and Chips, Meat and Potato pies and chips etc.) I am also taking an almost empty suitcase so I can pack it to the gunnels with food. I will be like a mad woman running around Asda throwing things in my cart.
BGinCHI
Plagiarism is for liberals who take responsibility for things.
Libertarians can’t be shackled with that kind of thing. God forbid this genius withholds his productivity!
David Koch
And the stock market hits another all time high today, thanks to community organizer, President Blackula.
Kyle
Every time I hear “this is hard” this is what I think of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8GlfkXQam4
maya
Rand obviously suffers from Klepto-graphia which may be covered under Obamacare
Suffern ACE
Bah. I haven’t seen him steal anything that wasn’t in the public domain. When its on the web, it’s free for everyone.
If someone isn’t standing guard over those words, it’s not his fault he was able to gather what others had left lying around. He put them to better use.
KG
@BGinCHI: well, I’ve had arguments with glibertarians wherein they argued that intellectual property rights were no true property rights. That it would be totally justifiable for them to buy a book and copy it and sell the copies for far less than the publisher did, because: CAPITALISM! Actually their argument was basically, “I can copy your design of a chair and sell it, why can’t I copy your book too?” The idea that there was something inherently different about the arts was just too hard to comprehend.
Granted, I think we’ve made a mockery of copyright laws to protect Disney’s earliest movies, but that’s a whole other argument.
SFAW
@maya:
That’s OK, he’s covered by the “Too fucking dumb and an asshole to boot” rider on his Daddy’s insurance policy. Of course, his dumb-fuck-edness-combined-with-assholery is a pre-existing condition, so maybe he really WON’T be covered, except under Obummercare.
gogol's wife
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
That’s it in a nutshell!
gogol's wife
@Kyle:
Funny!
Betty Cracker
You can sorta get a sense of the scale of the fuck-up by assessing the lameness of the excuses. At first, he was complaining about “haters,” meaning Maddow, who had the temerity to question the implications of his views on the Civil Rights Act and thus earned the everlasting enmity of the Paultroons.
Then Paul tried to pretend the criticism was about his using movie plots to make his point, a limp attempt at misdirection. Now he’s throwing staffers under the bus and pretending it’s a foot noting issue.
The Washington Times, a wingnut mullet wrapper, kicked his ass to the curb. Unfortunately, this may not be enough to sink Senator Ch-ch-chia. But it should be.
SarahT
So Rand Paul lifted his “writing” from The Week & the Washington Times, his “speeches” from Wikipedia, and his hairpiece from what, a salad bar ? An old box of Brillo ? From underneath a family of badgers ?
SFAW
@KG:
What’s mildly amusing is that the Randians who might follow that policy would be figuratively spitting on Rosenbaum’s grave, since she was (allegedly) big into the creators owning the rights etc. etc.
fuckwit
Privilege is a hell of a drug.
BGinCHI
@KG: They do not understand capitalism at all. It’s fucking laughable.
chopper
coughing up some sympathy for rand paul is hard.
SFAW
@chopper:
No it isn’t, although I’ve never seen “a loogie” spelled that way before.
KG
@SFAW: most of the one’s I’ve had that debate with (and it’s been a long time) tended not to be of the creative side. Those who had some creativity in them understood the importance of intellectual property rights. Of course, one of the funniest arguments was: well, there were no copyright laws for Shakespeare! At that point I’d just give up and go have more vodka.
@BGinCHI: they understand a very simple form of capitalism, based entirely on the idea that everyone is greedy and trying to get over on everyone else.
Chris
@KG:
In case you didn’t see it, they lifted that argument from “The Social Network.”
If you’re going to defend plagiarism, why not plagiarize your defense of it, too? :D
KG
@Chris: actually, a lot of those arguments were made before myspace, let alone Facebook or a movie about Facebook
BGinCHI
@KG: Right. And that is not capitalism. They would have to ignore history to make any argument to the contrary.
It’s pathetic. They would never pass an undergrad class in anything to do with this subject.
Chris
@KG:
FTFY!
Chris
@KG:
I stand corrected.
KG
@Chris: I’m sure they still make the same arguments, I just got to the point where I no longer felt it necessary to engage. They’re so far outside the consensus that it makes no sense to argue with them unless I’m testing my blood pressure.
ranchandsyrup
Demands empathy but doesn’t have any for people not in his tribe. I used to think that sort of behavior was a bug but its prevalence makes me think it’s a feature of humanity.
JustRuss
Leave
BritneyRand Paul alooooooone!Chris
I remember when George W. Bush discovered the same thing.
It’s always funny when one of these guys discovers to his astonishment that one of the job fields they’d been deriding as useless and phony all this time (in this case, government) is, in fact, hard.
LanceThruster
Reminds me a little of this joke —
A harried executive asks his secretary, “Where the hell is my pen?”
The secretary answers him back, “It’s behind your ear, sir.”
To which the executive replies, “Dammit! I’m a busy man. *Which* ear?”
Bill E Pilgrim
@LanceThruster: Funny I heard the same punchline but in an entirely different joke.
KG
@Chris: being a politician is easy… you make some speeches, collect some donations, get some yard signs printed up, travel around and shake some hands. Governing, that is actually what’s hard.
ETA: I would present Exhibit A as Sarah Palin. Her speechifying and fundraising was not so bad, but actually running stuff?
LanceThruster
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
xD
LanceThruster
@Bill E Pilgrim:
If I could remember where I stole it from, I’d look it up.
Bill E Pilgrim
@LanceThruster: I was kidding.
It just loomed out there as a slow “that’s what she said” type curve ball, I couldn’t help myself.
Chris
@KG:
Which is why she quit without even finishing her turn. Even the minimal duties associated with politics were too much hard work for her, at least when there was another position right around the corner where you got to be a politician without the governing.
TooManyJens
I am shocked, shocked, that a member of the Paul family would try to deflect responsibility for something published under his name.
Litlebritdiftrnt
@LanceThruster:
I told my boss today “do not under any circumstances talk to any clients” he said “why” I said “because you don’t know who they are and that annoys them”.
Mandalay
@Betty Cracker:
It won’t be. Biden did far worse thievery and managed to do quite well for himself. Come to think of it, has any politician ever been seriously harmed after being busted for plagiarism? It goes with the territory…exaggerating, spinning, distorting, lying fabricating, etc…no real biggie in the scheme of things for politicians.
Even fraudster Doris Kearns Goodwin has survived, and plagiarism in her field used to be a bigger crime than skull fucking dead babies.
What plagiarism reveals about someone now is not that they are dishonest, but that they are incompetent. You have to be a total idiot to believe that you can get away with it any more.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
Remember when Rand’s daddy asserted that he didn’t read the items in the newsletter published under his name?
ETA: TooManyJens beat me to it.
LanceThruster
@Litlebritdiftrnt:
[big grin]
Mandalay
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
That was the unpersuasive argument Fareed Zakaria used: “I am absolutely not a plagiarist. I’m just really busy”.
SFAW
@Mandalay:
Outside of the Kinnock thing, what are you on about?
“Thomas,” our new troll, said the same thing two or three days ago, then decided not to cite. Or perhaps he did, after the thread was more-or-less dead.
SFAW
@Mandalay:
Only if he plagiarized a live boy or dead girl.
No, wait, that’s something else …
TooManyJens
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set):
Ron: Answer me! Who taught you how to do this stuff?
Rand: You, all right? I learned it by watching you!
Steeplejack
@Mandalay:
Shouldn’t you have cited Cole there, or does substituting babies for kittens get you off the hook?
shelly
And I love his “leave me the hell alone’ bluster. Yup, politics is exactly what you want to get into if you want a completely private life.
Mandalay
@SFAW:
Well apart from the Kinnock thing (which involved blatant lying as well as plagiarism) he has also been caught stealing the words of Robert Kennedy, JFK and Hubert Humphrey. And (for me) worst of all…
I find that really icky, since it happened before he ever became a politician.
All that said, if Biden runs for president in 2016 he’ll get my wholehearted support. He has many fine qualities, but honesty isn’t one of them.
sm*t cl*de
“The Dog Ate My Homework” is one thing. “The dog wrote my homework” is an entirely different level.
Savage Henry
I hate that these potential 2016 candidates are taking themselves out of the running so early. It would be so much better if they publicly self-immolated during the primary process in fall 2015 like Perry or Cain did in 2011
El Caganer
Rand Paul, Libertarian: lifting himself by someone else’s bootstraps.
mclaren
I think we just have to recognize, in the immortal words of Rand Paul, that
— Rand Paul, 2013.
He brought a tear to my eye with those comments.
A Humble Lurker
@Mandalay:
Seriously? Something that happened roughly fifty years ago, was found out and marked with the appropriate grade is the worst to you? Biden must be a pretty alright guy then, if that’s the worst.
Paul in KY
@Litlebritdiftrnt: Hope you have a wonderful time. My mother was born in Warrington.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@KG:
Someone needs to explain the concept of design patents to them.