Guest AuthorI used to have a ready quip whenever someone would ask me who I favored in some sporting event or political race in which I had no use for either contestant: “I’m rooting for injuries,” I’d say.
OK, it’s supposed to be clever, but I know it’s gratuitously nasty, inappropriate and beneath me. It’s also probably not original, but, hey, cut me some slack — I’m busy here. I can’t be expected to come up with my own words and ideas all the time!
And that is the gist of what Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is saying in the wake of disclosures that he has borrowed rather liberally (some irony there) from others in speeches, a newspaper column, and in a book without giving proper attribution. While manfully confessing to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the buck stopped with him when it came to assigning blame, Paul was far more peevish in interviews with ABC News and with The New York Times.
The senator acknowledged to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that some of the work in question had been “sloppy,” but he also said, “I take it as an insult and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting.”
Paul blamed what the Times called “the overwhelming workload” of “a freshman senator in high demand.” Then Paul added, according to the Times, “This is coming from haters to begin with, because they want the implication to be out there that you’re dishonest.” He even whined that if the criticism were to continue, he just might pick up his ball and go home. “I’ll go back to being a doctor,” he said, “and I’ll be perfectly content.”
Before we address the substance of Paul’s remarks, please note the careful use of attribution in the above paragraphs. And quotation marks are not decorative; they make clear the ownership of words.
You see, if you are a journalist you can commit no greater sin than to take someone else’s words and ideas and claim them as your own. Sadly for our battered and bruised profession, in recent years plagiarism scandals have erupted at publications large and small. The Times, in particular, blindly hosted a serial plagiarist in Jayson Blair, whose unmasking led to the ouster of the paper’s executive editor in 2003.
The website iThenticate, which offers tools to identify purloined work, says, “For matters of plagiarism, 2012 will be a year that will live in infamy.” Reading its accompanying list of shame, I might arrive at the same conclusion — but I wouldn’t, unless I acknowledged that iThenticate had arrived there first.
One of the marvelous tools we’ve been given by the personal computer is the ability to “copy and paste.” The above quote from iThenticate was copied-and-pasted right from its website; I didn’t even have to retype the line (though I did have to resize the typeface to match my own sentences).
Which leads us back to Senator Paul. There are a number of reasons a journalist, academic or politician will plagiarize. The offender is either a) lazy; b) fundamentally dishonest; c) pressed into panic by a deadline; or d) someone else, a staffer perhaps, committed the offense. None of these is an excuse, but Paul seems to be falling back on “d” as his defense, which is no defense at all.
The Washington Times quite rightly terminated Paul’s column when it discovered just one instance of plagiarism. It is customary for Senate aides to write speeches, blogs, Tweets and even newspaper columns for their boss. But the column included a plagiarized passage, and it has Paul’s photo and byline above those words, not those of some junior staffer laboring to craft elegant prose worthy of the senator’s libertarian views.
In journalism and academia, plagiarism almost always gets you an immediate pink slip. Among politicians, though, the consequences are rarely severe. Joe Biden had to drop out of the presidential race in 1988 when it was revealed that he had plagiarized several times, and where is he today?
Maybe Paul was looking at the VP’s throne at the front of the Senate chamber when he decided to embrace the what’s-the-big-deal response to the plagiarism charges. But, according to the website Oxford Dictionaries (there’s that attribution again), there are some 180,000 words in the English language. There are a nearly infinite number of ways to assemble nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that are uniquely your own. It’s not that hard to be original.
Regardless of the inevitable gloating from Democrats and some moderate Republicans hoping to turn the tide against the likes of Kentucky’s junior senator, Rand Paul will survive this, unless there are more revelations of plagiarism.
If that were the case, imagine Paul being challenged in a primary by someone even farther to the right than him. There are no words to describe that.
