Rand Paul and/or his minions have a serious plagiarism problem

Word-for-word passages lifted from a magazine piece for an op-ed he "wrote":

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/us/politics/senator-rand-paul-faces-new-charges-of-plagiarism.html?_r=0

 

By the way, the irony of The Week being plagiarized should hopefully be lost in no one.

 

Josh Marshall put it best this morning when he wrote, "there does seem to be an intergenerational issue in the Paul clan with plagiarist and racist staffers continually foisting on their byline things they didn't write and in many cases who the foisters didn't write either."***

*talkingtpointsmemo.com
**not Point of Order original copy.

 

He wants to challenge his "haters" to a duel? Who does he think he is, Zell Miller?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/sen-paul-i-wish-i-could-duel-with-hacks-and-haters-accusing-me-of-plagiarism-video

 

Outing alert: Rand Paul is Drip.

 

Awesome.

 

Makes you wonder how many politicians would stand up to this scrutiny.

I'm betting you could find a lot more examples.

 

You would think someone will, right? Lot of people sweating it right now, for sure.

Of course, as if we didn't know this already, it also basically exposes in an embarrassing way the fact that these guys don't write their own material.

This doesn't apply to Paul but, again, I wonder how much it has to do with their backgrounds in lawyering. From my experience, four or five people or even more may have their hand on a brief, particularly lengthy appellate briefs. But one or two names go on there - the lead partners on that case who were more editors than they were writers. There's nothing untoward about it. Practices vary from industry to industry. In journalism, you write your own shit, end of story.

 

Yes, I'm shocked Senator "Bow to Aqua Buddha" couldn't withstand a little national scrutiny.

Let's not paint with too broad a brush here. Rand Paul is a relative newcomer. Maddow exposed his extremism and false-intellectualism when she flushed him out on opposing the Civil Rights Act. The Aqua Buddha thing should have been more than a little disconcerting. Despite his rising-star, rock star status on the right, it won't come as a surprise to the well-informed that he is in fact a neophyte.

(Are you listening, Ted Cruz?)

 

I can't wait to see how he responds. He basically drew the spoken vs. printed word line last week, and I concurred, particularly considering what he was repeating and where he was repeating it from.

Now he basically has to admit that someone else wrote this, right? I don't know how else he gets out of it.

At the risk of violating the no-politics edict, I wonder what kind of legs this has. Is it something that could seriously derail his 2016 aspirations? Or is this Paul Ryan's marathon time, redux? I'll justify asking that question by noting that I'm more interested in what that says about how the public views plagiarism than I am about the actual political implications.

 

LOL. Do you know Cruz's background?

 

Let's get this out of the way now: Rand Paul has NO chance of being president. None.