The Washington Times is saying “buh bye” to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s column amid a host of plagiarism allegations. All that was missing was Donald Trump saying his famous two words:
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul acknowledged Tuesday he had failed to properly source material in published writings, including a column in The Washington Times, after a string of embarrassing plagiarism accusations surfaced in recent days.
Mr. Paul took personal responsibility for the oversights, which he and aides said were caused by staff providing him background materials that were not properly footnoted. But the Kentucky Republican, a possible 2016 White House candidate, also said he was being held by the news media to a higher standard than other politicians.
It’s the old “but Mommy what about what Freddy did, he does it, too!” defense. Except Mr. Paul hasn’t supplied this long list of politicians who do far worse than him.
On the other hand, there are an awful lot of Republicans regurgitating up parts of Rush Limbaugh’s show without attributing it:
“The standard I’m being held to is a little different than everybody else,” Mr. Paul said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “They’re now going back and reading every book from cover-to-cover and looking for places where we footnoted correctly and don’t have quotation marks in the right places or we didn’t indent correctly.”
The Washington Time’s statement was typical corporatespeak trying to downplay a corporation giving someone all but a literal boot in the can to get ease him out the door:
The Washington Times said Tuesday it had independently reviewed Mr. Paul’s columns and op-eds and published a correction to one column on Sept. 20 in which the senator had failed to attribute a passage that first appeared in a magazine.
The newspaper and the senator’s office mutually agreed to end his weekly column, which has appeared on each Friday in the newspaper since the summer.
“We expect our columnists to submit original work and to properly attribute material, and we appreciate that the senator and his staff have taken responsibility for an oversight in one column,” Times Editor John Solomon said.
“We also appreciate the original insights he has shared with our readers over the last few months and look forward to future contributions from Sen. Paul and any other members of Congress who take the time to help educate our readers with original thought leadership pieces,” Mr. Solomon said.
And, indeed, Paul’s serial plagiarism is one for the books;
The website BuzzFeed reported that a section of Mr. Paul’s 2012 book “Government Bullies” appeared to have lifted sections of an earlier Forbes article.
The site also first reported that Mr. Paul copied sections of an opinion piece on mandatory sentencing, “The devastating effect of a drug-war weapon,” in The Washington Times from an article in the Week.
I periodically write for The Week. It has great posts that just beg to be read.
And, apparently, plagiarized.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.