US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4330

On July 20 2016 03:06 Gorsameth wrote:
why is it so hard to search for a specific tweet from 2008 ^^

On July 20 2016 03:16 GGTeMpLaR wrote:
"CNN won't stop talking about plagiarism. There was an axe attack on a fucking train. 3 cops were killed 2 days ago. Melania's speech is all they're talking about. They have a 5 person panel discussing it. "

sums it up nicely

On July 20 2016 03:06 Gorsameth wrote:
why is it so hard to search for a specific tweet from 2008 ^^

On July 20 2016 03:16 The Bottle wrote:
I looked at the transcripts of Melania Trump and Michelle Obama's speeches. Basically one paragraph out of a very long speech looks strikingly similar. And it's not a paragraph that makes a very specific point, it's really just a few platitudes and trite statements. The kind that look so generic I would expect them to appear in a thousand different speeches. So yeah, this looks to me like a media overblow of major proportions.

On July 20 2016 03:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Looks like no one is getting fired or even investigated over it. How stupid.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/19/politics/melania-trump-michelle-obama-speech/index.html

On July 20 2016 03:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Looks like no one is getting fired or even investigated over it. How stupid.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/19/politics/melania-trump-michelle-obama-speech/index.html

On July 20 2016 03:23 KwarK wrote:

The sentiments are common, sure. But the specific words in the same order, that doesn't just happen. Consider the probabilities of the two explanations. One, Ivanka Trump, for whom English is a second language, chose the exact same words in the exact same order to explain the exact same sentiments without using any synonyms or variations. Two, Ivanka Trump had someone incompetent/malicious help her with her speech.

I mean sure, you can argue that it could just happen and I could start arguing that maybe the World Trade Center would have collapsed due to unforeseen structural issues on 9/11 anyway and that the plane thing was just a coincidence. But we should accept the much more logical argument that the reason the same words appear in the same order expressing the same sentiments from two people with a vastly different educational and social background is because one of them used the words of the other.

Biden lifted Kinnock's precise turns of phrase and his sequences of ideas—a degree of plagiarism that would qualify any student for failure, if not expulsion from school. But the even greater sin was to borrow biographical facts from Kinnock that, although true about Kinnock, didn't apply to Biden. Unlike Kinnock, Biden wasn't the first person in his family history to attend college, as he asserted; nor were his ancestors coal miners, as he claimed when he used Kinnock's words. Once exposed, Biden's campaign team managed to come up with a great-grandfather who had been a mining engineer, but he hardly fit the candidate's description of one who "would come up [from the mines] after 12 hours and play football." At any rate, Biden had delivered his offending remarks with an introduction that clearly implied he had come up with them himself and that they pertained to his own life.

Most American political reporters were not so attuned to Britain's politics that they recognized Kinnock's words. But Michael Dukakis' adviser John Sasso had seen the Kinnock tape. Without his boss's knowledge or consent, he prepared a video juxtaposing the two men's speeches and got it into the hands of Dowd at the Times, David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register, and NBC News. When the story broke on Sept. 12, Biden was gearing up to chair the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's far-right nominee. Biden angrily denied having done anything wrong and urged the press to chase after the political rival who had sent out what came to be called the "attack video."

Unfortunately for Biden, more revelations of plagiarism followed, distracting him from the Bork hearings. Over the next days, it emerged that Biden had lifted significant portions of speeches from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. From Kennedy, he took four long sentences in one case and two memorable sentences in another. (In one account, Biden said that Pat Caddell had inserted them in his speech without Biden's knowledge; in another account, the failure to credit RFK was chalked up to the hasty cutting and pasting that went into the speech.) From Humphrey, the hot passage was a particularly affecting appeal for government to help the neediest. Yet another uncited borrowing came from John F. Kennedy.

"I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect," Biden sniped at the voter. "I went to law school on a full academic scholarship." That claim was false, as was another claim, made in the same rant, that he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. Biden wrongly stated, too, that he had earned three undergraduate degrees, when in fact he had earned one—a double major in history and political science. Another round of press inquiries followed, and Biden finally withdrew from the race on Sept. 23.

The sheer number and extent of Biden's fibs, distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at the time as worrisome, to say the least. While a media feeding frenzy (a term popularized in the 1988 campaign) always creates an unseemly air of hysteria, Biden deserved the scrutiny he received. Quitting the race was the right thing to do.

Twenty-one years on, how much should Biden's past behavior matter? In and of itself, the plagiarism episode shouldn't automatically disqualify Biden from regaining favor and credibility, especially if in the intervening two decades he's not done more of the same, as seems to be the case. But no one has looked into it. The press should give his record since 1988 a thorough vetting. It's worth knowing whether the odds-on favorite to be our next vice president has truly reformed himself of behavior that can often be the mark of a deeply troubled soul.