Biden's Plagiarism Wasn't Just Plagiarism -- He Was Makin' Up Fake Shit That Someone Else Made Up
Plus: Biden = Racist!

Instapundit keeps saying Joe Biden got a bum rap on the plagiarism deal. I tend to trust him, so I figured, yeah, he got a bum deal.

Not so. It's not just about the plagiarism of Neil Kinnock's speech -- it's also about Biden's claiming that Kinnock's personal biographical details were his own. And it's about his general pattern of lying and, yes, plagiarizing, a habit that got him an "F" in law school. (The same law school were he'd later have to fib about his class standing, as it turns out.)

Biden's misdeeds encompassed numerous self-aggrandizing thefts, misstatements, and exaggerations that seemed to point to a serious character defect....

At first Biden would credit Kinnock when he quoted him. But at some point he failed to offer the attribution. Biden maintained that he lapsed only once—at a debate at the Iowa State Fair, on Aug. 23, when cameras recorded it—but Maureen Dowd of the New York Times reported two incidents of nonattribution, and no one kept track exactly of every time Biden used the Kinnock bit.

This is where I think Instapundit gets the bum rap idea from. But wait, there's a lot more to it.

What is certain is that Biden didn't simply borrow the sort of boilerplate that counts as common currency in political discourse—phrases like "fighting for working families." What he borrowed was Kinnock's life.

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.

Additional bits of plagiarism were then discovered. Click the link for all the details.

If that wasn't bad enough, Biden admitted the next day that while in law school he had received an F for a course because he had plagiarized five pages from a published article in a term paper that he submitted....

Next tackled is Biden's claim of being a civil-rights crusader, and his lie-filled "My IQ is higher than yours" defense.

Let's cut to the end:

...

The sheer number and extent of Biden's fibs, distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at the time as worrisome, to say the least....

Twenty-one years on, how much should Biden's past behavior matter?

Well, given the fact that he just invented a trio of Action-Packed Tales of Courage Under Fire in the Green Zone a few months ago, I'd say Biden's days of convenient lies and resume-padding aren't quite over yet.

Barack Amer-- In their joint campaign appearance, Biden referred to Obama as either " Barack Emir" or " Barack Amer--" Some people, including me, thought maybe he attempted to say "Barack America," but stopped himself.

I think I have the explanation.

First, note that what he said wasn't "Barack America." For one thing, he stopped himself after the second syllable. For another, the accent and vowel-pronunciation was wrong. He said something closer to "Emir."

So, what did he almost call Obama? The Poet Laureate of New Jersey is in the news periodically, most recently for writing a "poem" asking "Who told all the Jews to stay home that day?" (On 9/11.) He also wittily asked "What kind of Skeeza is Condoleeza?"

The poet's name, of course, is Ameri Baracka.

Biden got the "Barack" confused with "Baracka" and almost called him "Barack Ameri."

Is that racist?

I'm waiting for Joshey Marshall to get back to me on that.

posted by Ace at 06:41 PM

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