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A section of Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) book Government Bullies was lifted word-for-word from a Heritage Foundation study, the latest in a series of plagiarism accusations that are suddenly dogging the Kentucky Senator.

1,318 words of Rand’s 2013 publication were taken verbatim from a 2003 study by the political think tank. Heritage is attributed as the source of the information in the footnotes, but not cited as the source of the actual text in the book. In addition, later passages were similar to a Cato Institute report, Kaczynski reported.

This is at least third plagiarism allegation against Paul in the past week. Paul had lifted a plot summary of the movie Gattica from Wikipedia. Politico then found that a section of his response to President Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address was copied word-for-word from an Associated Press report in 2011. http://www.mediaite.com/online/report-rand-paul-copied-sections-of-201
3-book-from-think-tank-study/]

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Rand Paul on ABC: Plagiarism Charges the Work of ‘Hacks and Haters’

On This Week With George Stephanopoulos Sunday morning, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) rejected the plagiarism charges that have surfaced in the past week, claiming that he was “being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters.”

Paul predicted further revelations of bad attribution from his previous speeches, but maintained that they were not intentional. “I take it as an insult, and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest or misleading,” he said. “If dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, it’d be duel challenge.”

Host George Stephanopoulos asked if Paul would at least concede that his speechwriting process had been “sloppy.” Paul responded that most of his speeches were extemporaneous, and that he quotes people but rarely cites secondary sources.

“I think the spoken word really shouldn’t be held to the same standard that you have if you’re giving a scientific paper,” paul said. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rand-paul-on-abc-plagiarism-charges-the-wor
k-of-hacks-and-haters/]

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Without actually naming the MSNBC host who’s been all over his plagiarism like a Confederate flag over a Tea Party protest, Sen. Rand Paul expressed a wish to “duel” Rachel Maddow, or anyone else who dares to infer dishonesty from his habit of lifting from others in his speeches, on Sunday morning’s This Week. In an interview with host George Stephanopoulos, Paul explained why he would forego pistols at dawn with Rachel and company.

Paul to chalk his burgeoning plagiarism scandal to overactive “footnote police” (here’s a footnote to high-schoolers working on term papers: footnotes do not actually allow you to lift other people’s work verbatim).

Of course, Paul wouldn’t challenge anyone to a duel, because that would be insane, or immoral, or insane and immoral, right? Wrong. The reason Rand Paul gave for not wanting to race Rachel Maddow to see who could shoot whom in the face first was that “I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”

As jokes about firearms homicides go, it was pretty funny, but those unfamiliar with Kentucky politics might not have fully understood the punchline. It’s not just that shooting another human being to death wouldn’t “play well” in the Bluegrass State, it’s that in order to hold public office in the state, officeholders must swear an oath that they have never participated in a duel:

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Members of the General Assembly and all officers, before they enter upon the execution of the duties of their respective offices, and all members of the bar, before they enter upon the practice of their profession, shall take the following oath or affirmation: I do solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this Commonwealth, and be faithful and true to the Commonwealth of Kentucky so long as I continue a citizen thereof, and that I will faithfully execute, to the best of my ability, the office of …. according to law; and I do further solemnly swear (or affirm) that since the adoption of the present Constitution, I, being a citizen of this State, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons within this State nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as second in carrying a challenge, nor aided or assisted any person thus offending, so help me God.

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While Kentuckians have tried, from time to time, to have that provision removed from the state’s constitution, it’s still there, so if Rand Paul ever wants to hold statewide office, he’ll have to hold fire for now. Maybe it’s for the best, though, because Maddow is apparently not such a shabby shot. http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-only-thing-keeping-rand-paul-from-s
hooting-rachel-maddow-to-death-in-a-duel/

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Add another outlet to the growing list of sources Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) allegedly plagiarized: parts of an op-ed the Kentucky senator wrote in September closely resemble an article published days earlier in The Week.

Buzzfeed reported Monday night that paragraphs from Paul's Washington Times op-ed on mandatory minimum prison sentences, published on Sept. 20, appear to lift language from an article by The Week's Dan Stewart published on Sept. 14.


To give one example, Stewart wrote in his "Rethinking mandatory sentencing" that "By design, mandatory sentencing laws take discretion away from prosecutors and judges so as to impose harsh sentences, regardless of circumstances."

Paul's op-ed contained a virtually identical sentence: "By design, mandatory-sentencing laws take discretion away from prosecutors and judges so as to impose harsh sentences, regardless of circumstances."

Both pieces also related similar anecdotes about a man named John Horner, a father of three who faced a 25-year prison sentence for selling prescription painkillers to a friend who turned out to be a police informant.

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Add another outlet to the growing list of sources Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) allegedly plagiarized: parts of an op-ed the Kentucky senator wrote in September closely resemble an article published days earlier in The Week.

Buzzfeed reported Monday night that paragraphs from Paul's Washington Times op-ed on mandatory minimum prison sentences, published on Sept. 20, appear to lift language from an article by The Week's Dan Stewart published on Sept. 14.


To give one example, Stewart wrote in his "Rethinking mandatory sentencing" that "By design, mandatory sentencing laws take discretion away from prosecutors and judges so as to impose harsh sentences, regardless of circumstances."

Paul's op-ed contained a virtually identical sentence: "By design, mandatory-sentencing laws take discretion away from prosecutors and judges so as to impose harsh sentences, regardless of circumstances."

Both pieces also related similar anecdotes about a man named John Horner, a father of three who faced a 25-year prison sentence for selling prescription painkillers to a friend who turned out to be a police informant.

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On the one hand, the revelation that he lifted material from several speeches as well as whole pages of his book from other sources, without attribution, isn’t necessarily a 2016 candidacy-ender. What’s most politically self-destructive is Paul’s bizarre reaction to the charges – which really aren’t “charges,” they’re fact. Instead of admitting he or someone on his staff made an error and promising to toughen his standards, he’s attacked Rachel Maddow, who found the first instance of plagiarism, repeatedly and personally.

“This is really about information and attacks coming from haters,” he told ABC’s Latino-focused network Fusion. “The person who’s leading this attack — she’s been spreading hate on me for about three years now.” Ew, “spreading hate on me,” that sounds kind of disgusting, Rachel – really?

And then, in a bizarre, likely candidacy-ending interview with ABC’s “This Week,” he began talking about a duel.

“Yes, there are times when [speeches] have been sloppy or not correct or we’ve made an error,” Paul said. “But the difference is, I take it as an insult and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting. I have never intentionally done so.”

He went on: “And like I say, if, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”

“I think I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters.”

Paul’s assumption that normal people will hear his reference to fighting a duel and say, “Hell yeah!” betrays his permanent residency on the American fringe. He lives in a world where it’s always the 19th century south, and troubles are best handled with guns and guts, not government. Paul acts like nobody’s ever been either smart enough, or brave enough, to tell the plain truth – and once he does, common sense voters will recognize it and reward him. Instead, they recoil and go, “Huh?”

It reminds me of his first run-in with Rachel Maddow, in May 2010, when he told her he didn’t think the Civil Rights Act should apply to private businesses. He bobbed and he weaved but when Maddow asked point blank, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say ‘we don’t serve black people?’” He answered, “Yes,” and defended their “right” to discriminate as “freedom of speech.” (He also said he thought if he’d been alive back then, he’d have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) That’s the interview that made Maddow a “hater,” in Paul’s view.

I saw the same thing in his under-covered response to the revelation that his aide Jack Hunter was a neo-confederate racist who’d written a column headlined “John Wilkes Booth was right,” defending the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Paul, of course, came out against assassination – but then he went on to describe Lincoln the way neo-confederates do, as a tyrannical racist hypocrite who fought the Civil War not to end slavery but to consolidate Northern power.

There’s another problem with Paul’s over the top response to the plagiarism controversy: It suggests that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the term “plagiarism.” He has repeatedly insisted that he credited the original source of his speech material – the movie “Gattaca,” in one instance, and “Stand and Deliver” in another. But he does not seem to get that you can’t lift words directly from Wikipedia and claim them as your own – even though that’s something every sixth-grader knows. http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/rand-pauls-wacko-public-me
ltdown?page=0%2C0]

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Not surprisingly, Sen. Rand Paul is standing by his social media director and co-author Jack Hunter, the guy known as “Southern Avenger” who now dismisses his neo-Confederate past as a youthful indiscretion, even though he’s 39 and was still defending secession as recently as four years ago.

Paul argues that Hunter has recanted his most noxious views and, anyway, the guy is “incredibly talented.” Asked about Hunter’s habit, as a disk jockey, of dressing up in a Confederate flag ski mask, Paul played the exasperated, fun-loving libertarian.

“It was a shock radio job. He was doing wet T-shirt contests. But can a guy not have a youth and stuff? People try to say I smoked pot one time, and I wasn’t fit for office.” (Of course Paul was in college during his Aqua Buddha days; Hunter is 39.)

But it was when Paul took on Hunter’s hateful writing about Abraham Lincoln, including the odious essay “John Wilkes Booth Was Right,” defending Lincoln’s assassination, that he gave us a picture of his troubling views of Lincoln, which display the toned-down influence of neo-Confederates.

Paul presents a view of Lincoln that’s actually only a few degrees removed from the neo-Confederate revisionist history of our 16thpresident as a tyrannical hypocrite who was also a racist.

"There were great people who were for emancipation. Lincoln came to his greatness. One Republican congressman described it as ‘on borrowed plumage.’ I love the description, because there were some great fighters [for emancipation] and Lincoln had to be pushed. But I’m not an enemy of Lincoln."

That’s trademark Rand Paul, who’s trying to cast himself as the reasonable middle between states’ rights secessionists and the totalitarian Obama state: so he’s “not an enemy of Lincoln.” But the phrase “borrowed plumage” got my attention. It turns out Paul had made similar but more expansive remarks about Lincoln at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in April. There he praised the book “Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream,” by Lerone Bennett Jr.

Here’s what Paul told reporters that day:

"There’s a great book on Lincoln called “Forced into Glory” by Lerone Bennett. It’s a good book and there’s a great passage in there by a reconstruction Republican … who says that Lincoln shouldn’t be allowed to ride into glory on the borrowed plumage, from somebody else’s hat, from their glorious ride. I think there’s some truth to that … He came into his glory because of some people who were greater than he was … the abolitionists who pushed him kicking and screaming toward emancipation."

But there are a few problems with his story. It wasn’t a Republican congressman but Polish count Adam Gurowski who accused Lincoln of riding into glory on “borrowed plumage.” (The exact quote is “History will not allow one to wear borrowed plumage.”) Gurowski was an admirer of radical Republicans whose tough federal approach to Southern reconstruction the libertarian Paul cannot possibly endorse, so I would wager he doesn’t understand it.

The “borrowed plumage” quote comes from Gurowski via Bennett’s “Forced Into Glory,” which Civil War historian James McPherson took apart thoroughly in the New York Times. Sadly for Bennett, his tendentious, cherry-picking case for Lincoln as racist hypocrite has become required neo-Confederate reading. You can find it frequently referenced at LewRockwell.com. Yes, the same Lew Rockwell who produced Ron Paul’s racist newsletter. It undergirds neo-Confederate writer Thomas diLorenzo’s crusade against all things Lincoln, including the movie — which was cited approvingly on Ron Paul’s website, under the headline “Lincoln the Racist.” Not surprisingly, Jack Hunter admired the book.

OK, that was in 2004. Hunter says he doesn’t believe that John Wilkes Booth was right anymore. But as recently as 2009, he was quoting Bennett approvingly to compare Lincoln to Hitler. There’s his Charleston City Paper column, “Those who compare Confederate soldiers to Hitler should look at Lincoln”.

Now, Rand Paul would never compare Lincoln to Hitler, of course. But his casual, self-satisfied assertion that Lincoln was “forced into glory” is a staple of neo-Confederate Lincoln hate, even if he says he’s “not an enemy” of the president who fought the Civil War to end slavery. This is classic Paul, trying to have it both ways.

You can cherry-pick quotes from Lincoln to prove virtually anything about his racial views. He was, in fact, a supporter of a colonization plan to send freed slaves to Africa — Liberia was usually the destination — for a time. He made many disturbing public declarations of his belief in black inferiority. But his views changed. In his last speech before he died, Lincoln indicated he supported giving the vote to freed slaves who were literate or had served in the Union army. Although that didn’t satisfy Lerone Bennett, as McPherson observed, since no such requirements applied to whites, it outraged slavery defenders. ”That means nigger citizenship,” John Wilkes Booth replied. ”Now by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

The cartoonish view of Lincoln as racist hypocrite expounded in “Forced Into Glory” is a dangerous lie that undergirds neo-Confederate thinking. But it’s a particularly good choice for Paul because it happens to be by a black man. Still, that he cited a mostly debunked work of Lincoln-hate approvingly shows that he’s right in refusing to fire or even distance himself from Hunter – because he believes many of the same things. http://www.salon.com/2013/07/11/rand_paul_completely_mangles_lincoln/

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Rand Paul’s Wikipedia-Gate Gets Serious and Maddow Gets the Last Laugh

For more than a week, Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s flagship host, has been pursuing the story surrounding Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) lifting of the plotlines of the movie Gattaca from the film’s Wikipedia page in a speech.

Her tenacity in pursuit of that story inspired a series of jokes among conservatives at Maddow’s expense. But then, one week into the coverage of Paul’s “Wikipedia-gate,” new details emerged about Paul’s history of plagiarism. Far more egregious offenses came to light in outlets like BuzzFeed and the New York Times.

“In an op-ed article he wrote for The Washington Times in September on mandatory minimum prison sentences, Mr. Paul, a Republican, appears to have copied language directly from an essay that had previously run in The Week magazine,” Times reporter Jonathan Martin wrote on Monday.

The gravity of this revelation was compounded by an earlier report which indicated that “three pages” of Paul’s book were plagiarized from a 2003 Heritage Foundation study.

Paul and his supporters mocked Maddow’s charge of plagiarism surrounding the Wikipedia issue when it first broke. He said that the attacks on him would, in another era, be sufficient cause to call for a duel with the aim of restoring his sullied honor.

There is nothing trivial about plagiarism. Paul would be well-advised to take ownership of these infractions, correct for them, and ensure that they never happen again. Furthermore, he would also be well-served to not lash out at those who criticize them – especially when they can be so easily proven correct.

Update: Rand Paul has released a statement in which his office apologizes for his staff’s inappropriate references to other published works without citation.

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In the thousands of speeches and op-eds Sen. Paul has produced, he has always presented his own ideas, opinions and conclusions. Sen. Paul also relies on a large number of staff and advisers to provide supporting facts and anecdotes – some of which were not clearly sourced or vetted properly.

Footnotes presenting supporting facts were not always used. Going forward, footnotes will be available on request. There have also been occasions where quotations or typesetting indentations have been left out through errors in our approval process. From here forward, quoting, footnoting and citing will be more complete.

Adherence to a new approval process implemented by Sen. Paul will ensure proper citation and accountability in all collaborative works going forward.

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http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rand-pauls-wikipedia-gate-gets-serious-and-
maddow-gets-the-last-laugh/

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Sen. Rand Paul says he shouldn't have to stay in 'detention' forever for reported instances of plagiarism in his speeches and writings. But examples of pilfered prose keep emerging.

Someday, the political world may forget the time when Sen. Rand Paul was caught plagiarizing other sources for some of his speeches and writings. It is a blight on one’s brand, no matter that the Kentucky Republican has likened his case to a high school kid who got too cozy with Wikipedia. “Do I have to be in detention the rest of my career?” he asks.

Sen. Paul has felt a sort of shunning. The Washington Times and Paul have “mutually agreed” to end his regular column, the conservative newspaper announced this week.

“We expect our columnists to submit original work and to properly attribute material, and we appreciate that the senator and his staff have taken responsibility for an oversight in one column,” Times Editor John Solomon said. The newspaper got stung by a Paul column on mandatory sentencing, parts of which were identical to passages in a piece in The Week, BuzzFeed found.

Paul will continue to be able to preach (in writing) to the choir, however, via the tea party web site Breitbart.com. Without mentioning the plagiarism flap or his split with the Washington Times, Breitbart executives embraced Paul in making the announcement this week.

“We are pleased to add Senator Paul to our lineup of fearless, original thought leaders," said Breitbart News CEO Larry Solov. "Most of all, we think the fighting spirit he has become known for is a perfect fit for Breitbart News Network and reflects that of our founder, Andrew Breitbart.”

Meanwhile, a couple more instances involving Paul using other sources without giving due credit have risen.

“(I)n two 2013 speeches, Paul borrowed from a conservative think-tank without attribution.”

“In his speech at the Value Voters Summit on October 11, Paul appropriated written material from the Gatestone Institute, a think-tank chaired by John Bolton.

“The transcript of the speech has been removed from Paul’s web site – as have the transcripts from numerous other speeches while Paul battles an ongoing plagiarism scandal – but it can be found using Google cache.

“Paul’s speech draws – without attribution – from two Gatestone Institute articles, ‘The Degradation of Christian Women Under Islam,’ published on September 11, 2013, and ‘Muslim Persecution of Christians,’ published on April 18th.

“While several elements of Paul’s speech were taken word for word from Gatestone, in other cases a single word or two was changed or added. Paul did not attribute Gatestone’s writing or research anywhere in the speech, as it was originally posted on his web site.”

Another example has been found of Paul using the work of the Gatestone Institute without attribution, this time in June in a speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Wire/2013/1109/Politic
al-plagiarism-Will-Rand-Paul-ever-get-out-of-detention-video

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