Plagiarism, Biden, Obama and Paul.

[No Elephants]

Once, Biden was excoriated for plagiarism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_presidential_campaign,_1988

Slate says that he quit the 1988 Presidential race because of it (not sure if that is actually the reason that Biden dropped out, but Slate says it is).

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2008/08/the_write_stuff.html

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama was accused of plagiarizing the 2006 campaign speeches of my Governor, Deval Patrick, who was at the time national campaign co-chair of the Obama campaign, especially the "just words" speech. (One David Axelrod had headed Patrick's 2006 campaign--the campaign that had made Patrick the first African American Governor of Massachusetts--and said David Axelrod was also heading Obama's 2008 campaign.)

Patrick went on national TV shows and defended Obama against the plagiarism charge, which soon fizzled.

Guess the media was not as riveted by Obama's alleged plagiarism i 2008 as it had been by Biden's in 1988. Besides, if the alleged original author of the allegedly plagiarized words, Deval Patrick, didn't seem to care about the alleged plagiarism, why should anyone else care?

But, now, it's Rand Paul. He's accused of plagiarizing wiki and the Cato Institute, among others (or of missing that his staff plagiarized). (Doesn't Cato exist in the very hope that politicians will appropriate its ideas?)

My first job out of college was public school teaching (before I got all corporate), so I, am inclined to take a hard line on plagiarism. Nonetheless, I am conflicted.

On the one hand, passing off someone's research, ideas and turn of phrase as your own is stealing intellectual property. (Which, btw, our current law classes as terrorism.) It's dishonest and it shows character flaws. In Biden's case, he even "borrowed" the life story of the person from whom he plagiarized, which is really chutzpah. (Oddly, the Slate article linked above dismisses Hart's extra-marital affair as media hectoring, but zeroes in on Biden's plagiarism as something on which the press should have drilled down. Isn't adultery a character flaw, too, though?)

On the other hand, no one sane thinks politicians are purest angels; and, in the scale of the crap that politicians wreak on us and our country, plagiarism seems literally like an old school concern. Heck, Mike Barnicle probably made a lot more as a commentator on Morning Joe than he ever did as a columnist for the Boston Globe, from which he got fired for resigned from, after plagiarizing one column and apparently fabricating another. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Barnicle

Moreover, Barnicle was a professional writer, not a politician. I think holding a professional writer to a higher standard about plagiarism is fair, not to mention that making up stuff about kids with cancer, which Barnicle also did, is pretty low. Guess MSNBC believes in crediblity redemption, well for Barnicle, anyway, though not for Paul.

As I said, I'm conflicted. However, if any of the three had been writing a term paper for my class, I'd really have no choice but to give him an F. Is running my country less serious than writing a term paper for my class? If someone shows me an obvious character flaw when he knows he is being most scrutinized, should I ignore it? I did wave off Obama's plagiarism in 2008. Was I wrong to do that?

In Paul's case, my decision on the plagiarism issue is irrelevant, because I would disqualify Paul as a candidate for several other reasons. But, what if I liked Paul as a candidate, as I did Obama in 2008? Should plagiarism disqualify a Presidential candidate?