The Plagiarizing Pair

And so in the 232nd year of the Republic, 143 years after the end of the Republic's Civil War, the Democratic Party's presumed standard bearer for the Presidential election chooses a Senator from the state of Delaware to be his running-mate. The political Party which chose Secession from the Union as its course in 1860, the Party which instituted the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate blacks, now has as it's Vice Presidential candidate - Senator Joe Biden - a man who had this to say, in 2006, while speaking in South Carolina as he tested the waters for a 2008 Presidential bid:

[...]
The senator then pounced on a member's announcement that the club would hold its annual Christmas party at the state Department of Archives and History where members could view the original copy of the state's [South Carolina] Articles of Secession.

Biden asked, "Where else could I go to a Rotary Club where (for a) Christmas party the highlight is looking at the Articles?"

Biden was on a roll.

Delaware, he noted, was a "slave state that fought beside the North. That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way."

Certainly Biden was joking. His statement was in the same vein as those of Trent Lott who lauded Strom Thurmond at his 100th Birthday celebration. Lott, though, was handed his head for his ‘racism’, forced to relinquish his Republican leadership post in the US Senate. Why the different standards? Well, because Joseph Biden is a Democrat; Trent Lott is a Republican.
One has to wonder if the Obama camp even looked at the statements of Joe Biden. How will this play out with the Democrats' most loyal constituency - black Americans? A Democrat from what was once a slave State, in this day, should have no worries that his home state's history will be a problem. After all, dJimmuh Carter hailed from the Deep South, the slave State of Georgia, and won the Presidency in 1976. 143 years is too long to be dwelling on the bygone past. And yet ...

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday" in August [2006], Biden made the case for his candidacy in the South, according to an AP account at the time, saying, "'You don't know my state. … My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state.'"

Yes, indeed, Biden does have his problems with his mouth. Or his brain. He's a glib speaker, far better on his feet than the "Umm King", Barack Obama, and no slouch at Foreign Affairs (Biden voted for the Iraq War/ against the Surge). But he was nailed to the wall in his 1987 Presidential bid for his use of a speech originally uttered by a British politician (Neal Kinnock - Labor). It was not his first instance of plagiarism, and that speech, with its resulting uproar (inspired by his Democrat rivals), would finally force him out of the race.

As Famous Plagiarists puts it:

Biden initially denied any wrongdoing, claiming that this was just an inadvertent lack of acknowledgement. Yet there were other instances of rhetorical borrowing from speeches made by Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. And the fact that Biden had given other speeches using the Kinnock passages without acknowledgment suggested that the lifting was more than just an inadvertent oversight.

Well, perhaps that makes him a perfect match for Barack Obama. After all, Obama regularly plagiarizes the speeches and words of others. Unlike Biden, Obama was immediately exonerated of any offense by those he plagiarized. Times have changed, eh, Joe?

So the team is set for the Democrats as they stumble into the Convention in Denver. Two plagiarizers - stealing the words of others more quotable than themselves - will be the standard-bearers. The head of the ticket one who has little experience in the real world of the nation he expects to lead, the other one still celebrating his home state's slave history.

So here's the new bumpersticker for all the proud Lefties to cherish. It ain't perfect, I'm afraid, but then neither is that ticket! Hah!



Yeesh!

And back to bed this coughing blogger goes. TTFN!