In September 1987, Joe Biden quit the race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, in large part because he’d been caught plagiarizing a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock. A Tuesday Daily Kos post seemed to suggest that Biden should have dropped out back then even if it’d been his wife, Jill, exposed as a high-profile plagiarist…or maybe David Nir has a different standard for Republicans.
“Melania Trump’s stunning plagiarism at the Republican National Convention should by all rights be fatal to her husband’s campaign for president, not merely because she plagiarized but because of who she plagiarized from,” declared Nir, who noted that Melania “stole from none other than Michelle Obama, whose family has been the target of the right’s most bitter hatred and ridicule for a decade now.”
Nir wrote that “Donald Trump has argued again and again that Barack Obama is an incompetent danger who is trying to drive the country aground, yet it’s the words of Obama’s own wife that the Trump family has seen fit to appropriate as its own. Those two things are impossible to square. If the Obamas are so odious and hazardous, how could their values be worth adopting? Or to reverse the equation, since the Obamas’ values are so evidently worthy of adoption, as Melania demonstrated through her theft, then the case against the Obamas falls apart.”
“So how can Trump go forward now, after admitting that the Obamas’ values are his values?” wondered Nir. “He cannot—he simply has no argument left to make.”
