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

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, Nov 5, 2013.

  1. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Rand Paul grew up around politics, but he was a practicing ophthalmologist before running for office.

    Cruz's background is vastly different, and makes him much more prepared for the rigors of the job, and the scrutiny. Plus, he's really fucking smart.
     
  2. MisterCreosote

    MisterCreosote Well-Known Member

    What, short of typing every word every politician speaks into a search engine, do you suggest they do?

    I'm a firm believer that these things are rarely found unless someone is specifically looking for them from a specific target.
     
  3. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I'm absolutely not sold on Christie even being a factor at this point. It sounds like he's done some real creative money-moving to create the illusion that his state is in great shakes, financially, when it's actually not. It's going to bite him. He's a spender.
     
  4. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Well, after Rachel Maddow broke the initial story and Paul ranted about it being an isolated incident brought to light by "haters," I think you do precisely that: Type every word he spoke into a search engine. Buzzfeed did. The stenographers just printed Paul's comments and called it a day. Shit, half the time people don't do that any more. They report what was said on Twitter, then hit the Beltway bars.
     
  5. Bob Cook

    Bob Cook Active Member

    Or, unless the original writer notices something.

    Take heed from Morrissey:

    You say : "'Ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn"
    And you claim these words as your own
    But I've read well, and I've heard them said
    A hundred times (maybe less, maybe more)
    If you must write prose/poems
    The words you use should be your own
    Don't plagiarise or take "on loan"
    'Cause there's always someone, somewhere
    With a big nose, who knows
    And who trips you up and laughs
    When you fall
    Who'll trip you up and laugh
    When you fall

    You say : "'Ere long done do does did"
    Words which could only be your own
    And then produce the text
    From whence was ripped
    (Some dizzy whore, 1804)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knM7ow5vMPA
     
  6. MisterCreosote

    MisterCreosote Well-Known Member

    Well, yeah, after Maddow broke it, I agree with you.

    But the Beltway press was never going to break this initially. Partly because of what you said, and partly because a lot of them think working for a living is beneath them.
     
  7. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Certainly every reporter/news org should have looked into it further once the initial story broke.

    I'm not sure if Buzzfeed was just faster, or if they were the only ones who did it.

    And, this is not to excuse Paul, at all, but I think it gives the story context if someone tries to show whether or not this is routine on Capital Hill, and to do that, you need to really spend some time, googling passages of speeches and Op-Eds.
     
  8. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Wait, wait, wait.

    The only thing that makes this post, and the posts of mine that you have criticized harshly, and gotten extremely defensive about, is the lack of the word "narrative".
     
  9. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    The Washington Times does not have unclean hands here.

    This is from Paul's column:

    John Horner was a 46-year-old father of three when he sold some of his prescription painkillers to a friend. His friend turned out to be a police informant, and he was charged with dealing drugs. Horner pleaded guilty and was later sentenced to the mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison.

    John will be 72 years old by the time he is released, and his three young children will have grown up without him. The informant, who had a long history of drug offenses, was more fortunate — he received a reduced sentence of just 18 months, and is now free.


    OK, great anecdote. Really buttresses the main point of the op-ed.

    But who is John Horner? Where is he from? How about a state at least? Where did you hear about him? How do we know this is true?

    Politicians regularly invent John Q. Publics to serve their point. Or, at the very least, they hyperbolize about them to serve their point. How does the Washington Times just print this anecdote, unchallenged? What kind of fact-checking is that department running over there? Inexcusable.

    The Week identified his state, though not where it heard about him:

    http://news.yahoo.com/rethinking-mandatory-sentencing-100000094.html

    It likely heard about him from this piece at The Atlantic, Versatile's favorite magazine:

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/a-heartbreaking-drug-sentence-of-staggering-idiocy/274607/

    Which acknowledges that it heard about him from the BBC:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21939453?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

    Which is - gasp! - credits and links to!
     
  10. Point of Order

    Point of Order Active Member

    It is a bit Manti Te'o-ish.
     
  11. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    The thing that gets me with Paul is that this is three times now, that we know of. There was the Wikipedia lift. There was the Heritage Foundation lift - 1,300-plus words - in his book. And now there is this Washington Times column. Unless YankeeFan is correct and every politician does the same thing, that's quite a coincidence. It can't just be one staff member doing it, can it? Maybe it can. It seems strange to me that a bunch of different people all keep making an elementary mistake like this, independently. Are they attributing correctly, and Paul just hacking it out for space/flow purposes?
     
  12. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    From my buddy on The Hill, Paul's staff is pretty much seen as a joke. Remember, Paul had a neo-Confederate as his social media director.
     
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