New Plagiarism Charge Haunts Rand Paul
First, he lifted from Wikipedia. Now it looks as if Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has lifted from a newsweekly:
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who in recent weeks has had to explain how Wikipedia entries came to be incorporated into his speeches with no attribution, faced charges of direct plagiarism on Monday night.
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 from an essay that had previously run in The Week magazine.
That article, written by Dan Stewart, an editor for The Week, included this sentence: “America now jails a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country, including China and Iran, at the staggering cost of $80 billion a year.” It was posted to the web on Sept. 14.
On Sept. 20, Mr. Paul wrote this: “America now jails a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country, including China and Iran, at the staggering cost of $80 billion a year.”
Mr. Paul’s article also mentioned a case involving a Florida man, John Horner, who was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years for selling painkillers. “John will be 72 years old by the time he is released, and his three young children will have grown up without him,” Mr. Paul wrote.
Mr. Stewart’s version: “He will be 72 by the time he is released, and his three young children will have grown up without him.”
Aides to Mr. Paul declined to comment about the apparent plagiarism, which was first reported by BuzzFeed.
Look at the bright side: the hapless senator is sure to name at least another “hater” he would like to shoot!
UPDATE: Raw Story reports that a certain senator from Kentucky has been sanitizing his Web site for your protection!
On Monday, [BuzzFeed’s Andrew] Kaczynski pointed out that some of those speech transcripts had been scrubbed from Paul’s Senate web page.
In the case of a Feb. 6 speech to the Heritage Foundation, Paul’s current page only contains a video, but Google cache shows that the page recently also had the entire transcript.
BuzzFeed found at least three other pages which had transcripts deleted.
