Thursday, August 28, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
The George Soros-funded Media Matters organization has charged that some news outlets have reported that Sen. Joseph Biden, picked as Barack Obama’s running mate, was drummed out of the 1988 presidential race for plagiarism.
Media Matters’ criticism of such truthful accounts is that Biden on other occasions had given credit to the person he stole the words from — a British politician named Neil Kinnock.
“Media outlets reported allegations Biden plagiarized Kinnock, but not that he had previously credited him,” said the Media Matters headline.
It wasn’t just a matter of using a few words. You can see a striking comparison of the Biden and Kinnock speeches here. Ironically, this website, devoted to the proper techniques of college writing, says that plagiarism “can destroy a career.” It hasn’t destroyed Biden’s.
Rather than take the ridiculously absurd Media Matters line, New York Times reporters Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny reported that Biden “quit the 1988 presidential race in the face of accusations that he had plagiarized part of a speech from Neil Kinnock, the British Labor Party leader at the time” and that “Shortly afterward, he was found to have suffered two aneurysms.”
Are they trying to imply that his brain problems accounted for the plagiarism? That doesn’t make any sense because it was also discovered that Biden had been found guilty of plagiarism in law school. But the Times didn’t mention that. It also came out that Biden had lifted material from a Bobby Kennedy speech.
Dan Balz of the Washington Post took a different line. “Biden also will have his 1988 presidential campaign and the charges of plagiarism that drove him from the race resurrected, at least in these opening days as he is introduced as Obama’s running mate. But that experience is long in the past and probably does not present a significant problem,” he said.
On what basis does he make the conclusion that it probably won’t be a significant problem? There is none. This is simply the preference of the major media, which will do their best to make sure it is not a significant problem. But when plagiarism happens in journalism, it is supposed to be a big deal.
Taking a different tack, Fred Barnes, a writer for The Weekly Standard and Fox News Channel commentator, said Biden had a “tendency to exaggerate or embellish his accomplishments” but that his political career “has flourished” since these incidents. He decided not even to use the word plagiarism.
As children are sent off to school and parents and teachers tell them that they are not supposed to cheat in their studies, this is not an unimportant matter. How do you explain to your children that they should be honest in their studies when somebody guilty of plagiarism is a sitting member of the Senate and is running for vice-president? What does this say about the character and integrity of the presidential nominee who picked him? Obama must have figured that since the major media have failed to seriously examine his background, they would be prepared to overlook or at least minimize Biden’s history of plagiarism. It was a good bet.
This flawed nominee not only has a history of plagiarism but a record of making noxious comments, such as off-color remarks about people of color and congratulating Obama himself for being physically “bright and clean.” No Republican senator could have survived such a scandalous record of outrageous utterances.
A friend had a brief discussion with Biden during a book signing in the spring at Rehoboth, Delaware. Biden was autographing copies of Promises to Keep, which examines his life and Senate career, including the plagiarism incidents. This individual was greatly concerned about the role of George Soros in financing the drug legalization movement but knew that Biden had been generally supportive of the war on drugs. She asked for Biden’s help in exposing Soros’s influence in the political process. He replied, “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Soros lately.” That ended the discussion.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to detect the hidden hand of George Soros in Obama’s Biden pick.
The media pundits say that Biden has good foreign policy credentials. But that assumes that Biden has ideas of his own and is not “borrowing” them from somewhere else. Soros is probably the source of many of them. He has financially supported Obama, Biden and other Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee.
What the public has to understand — and the media are not making clear — is that Biden may be the strongest supporter of the United Nations in the entire Congress today. He even supports an International Criminal Court. Plus, he helped ram Obama’s pro-U.N. Global Poverty Act and the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty through his Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The former was accomplished with no hearings and the latter with stacked hearings.
Years ago, Biden wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal (assuming that he actually wrote the article) under the headline, “How I Learned to Love the New World Order.” This can only be understood by taking into account a pamphlet entitled, “NATO and the New World Order,” written by billionaire George Soros, a major funder of Democratic Party politicians, including Biden, and the left-wing of the party. The Soros plan, which is identical to Biden’s, is to make NATO, once an anti-Communist alliance, into a military arm of the U.N.