A lot is being made about Mary Burke supposedly "plagiarizing" her jobs plan from other candidates' jobs plans. The truth is that she is the victim of a campaign consultant that was selling his same work to different clients. That's cheating the client (Burke), not plagiarism.
So that got me to thinking what plagiarism really looks like and jogged my memory...
Last year, on the day after Christmas, Ann Coulter wrote an anti-Kwanzaa column, Kwanzaa: Holiday Brought to You by the FBI, that is remarkably similar to the the anti-Kwanzaa press release State Sen. Glenn Grothman sent out two days later.
Coulter starts out by explaining that Kwanzaa is a fraud holiday that was invented by Ron Karenga:
It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga -- aka Dr. Maulana Karenga -- founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers.
...Grothman starts out by explaining that Kwanzaa is a fraud holiday invented by Ron Karenga:
It was invented in 1966 by Ron Karenga, a 1960s radical leader and founder of something called the "US Organization". This group, often referred to as the "United Slaves" is even more radical than the Black Panthers.
Coulter writes Karenga was a violent felon that is being rewarded by liberals as a professor at California State University:
In one barbarous outburst, Karenga's United Slaves shot to death two Black Panthers on the UCLA campus: Al "Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.
...Grothman writes Karenga was a violent felon that is being rewarded by liberals as a professor at California State University:
The United Slaves killed two Black Panther members and Karenga himself wound up going to prison for assaulting some of his own members. ...(By the way, after getting out of prison he was hired as a professor at California State Long Beach.)
Coulter asserts this is just a holiday celebrated by white liberals and wrongly conflates it with the religious holiday of Christmas:
It is a holiday celebrated exclusively by idiot white liberals. Black people celebrate Christmas.
...Grothman asserts this is just a holiday celebrated by white liberals and wrongly conflates it with the religious holiday of Christmas:
Of course, almost no black people today care about Kwanzaa - just white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people's throats in an effort to divide Americans.
Clearly the thoughts, ideas, central theme and much of the language from Coulter's column mysteriously found there way into Grothman's press release without attribution-- and that constitutes plagiarism. At least, according to Harvard:
In academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting the source in your paper. It doesn't matter whether the source is a published author, another student, a Web site without clear authorship, a Web site that sells academic papers, or any other person: Taking credit for anyone else's work is stealing.
Considering that Ann Coulter is perhaps the most factually inaccurate author around today, I would suggest to Senator Grothman that he find someone else's paper to copy next time around!
And Republicans? THIS is what plagiarism looks like.