Palin is Pallin’ Around With Plagiarists?
6 06 2009Todd Palin, that is. That’s because the plagiarist is none other than the Governor, herself.
Geoffrey Dunn over at Huffington Post read my transcript of Palin’s 17 minute introduction of Michael Reagan, and a little bell went off in his head. He had a strange feeling he’d heard all this somewhere before…..(except in English)…..
(insert harp music here, as things get all blurry)
I realized I had read some of this before. So I tracked down the original Gingrich-Shirley article, “Republicans Need to Relearn Lessons of the Reagan Revolution” which appeared in the Union Leader, November 1, 2005, and is also online.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Palin was accused by Daily Kos of plagiarizing a Hillary Clinton passage. In that instance it was, at worse, petty larceny; in this case, it’s grand theft.
Dunn goes on to compare passages of the original, and Palin’s knock-off. Here are a couple of the eleven examples he gives:
8. Palin: So Ronald Reagan spoke to us then with us here in our hearts is where he reached us…. He captured our hearts so he could affect positive change by what he did. He focused on our kids, on our children, on their future,
Gingrich/Shirley: The key to capturing the attention and, yes, the hearts of Americans is to focus on their future and their children’s future. Reagan understood this…9. Palin: He stood strong on his knowing that the framework through which he believed that positive change that framework for our kids, it was freedom [sic].
Gingrich/Shirley: Successful governance means having a framework through which to lead the American people. For Reagan, that framework was freedom.
Ruh-roh… Next time the governor sees Newt, she’s going to have some ’splainin to do.
The whole article is a must read. Click HERE to enjoy it in its entirety.
June 7th, 2009 at 6:32 PM
Thanks, Karin. I really hate to do that to anyone.
June 7th, 2009 at 7:02 PM
137 Karin in CT Says:
June 7th, 2009 at 5:06 PM
@ UK Lady hahahaha! Nice tip!
And the plot thickens… My guess is that she can’t speak at an event where Gringrich is the keynote speaker and plagiarize him at the same time.
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That was my first thought, as well.
As I posted on the previous post, the following satirical visual came to my mind of Palin and Newt at that dinner together:
Uncle Newt, the ventriloquist, with his li’l dummy Sarah sitting on his knee mouthing his speech….
I get the impression that Newt is NOT happy with this latest embarrassment by Palin. He surely regards himself as the intellectual heavyweight of the party who has put in the time, hard work, and study to gain that position….and along comes the shallow upstart who plagiarizes his words and ideas instead of doing the hard work herself. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he gave an ultimatum to the planners of the dinner regarding her status at the dinner.
June 7th, 2009 at 7:09 PM
73 AlaskaDisasta Says: June 7th, 2009 at 10:22 AM
Good Lord, she can’t even plagiarize well. How can anyone with half an ounce of a brain take a perfectly lucid sentence and completely bastardize it into something not only unrecognizable, but something idiotically inane?
____________
Well, that is the problem isn’t it? She’s got “half an ounce of brain. …”
June 7th, 2009 at 7:27 PM
123 sandra in oregon Says: June 7th, 2009 at 3:19 PM
On the other site the “masses” are saying this is not plagarizing and Huffpo could be sued for libel. I suggested over there that there should be an unbiased arbitration. Should it end up in the courts? Who could make a decision on this?
__________
I believe the Courts have already ruled on this type of situation. Plus, her words would be the noose around her neck. If Palin were to file suit, you would see a much clearer example of “frivolous” as compared to the numerous ethics complaints. My guess is that unlike Biden – who was drummed out by fellow Democrats – Palin will simply keep on doing whatever she’s been doing, totally unaware of the damage to her political reputation. This is the kind of happy road apples that keeps donors far, far away.
So, who really cares if vido or other peelanders wizz all over themselves?
June 7th, 2009 at 7:29 PM
Lee – you are absolutely correct about how Newt views himself. He has long been bitter that neither Yale nor Harvard nor Princeton asked him to join their faculty after he left Congress. In his mind, he’s much brighter than anyone in CT, MA or NJ… and certainly brighter than anyone in the state of GA.
June 7th, 2009 at 7:34 PM
You just can’t fix stupid. All you can do is steer it into a different direction. There will eventually be people who say to themselves, I can’t believe how stupid I was to support Palin. The only problem is that they won’t be saying that until they have thrown their support to the next flavor of the year idelogue spouting Reaganism.
June 7th, 2009 at 7:36 PM
I’ve always avoided reading at the red site but today I was feeling left out so I girded my loins and went there. I soon found myself scrolling down the page, skipping the quotes and looking for some original thought.
The only interesting thing I noted was the writers’ constant name-calling of AKM. They find themselves constantly writing about AKM but are apparently unable to remember their manners when they do.
Name-calling indicates impotent fury and it’s a hallmark of poor writing. AKM never resorts to name-calling under any circumstance. AKM does not write about them, nor even mention them.
‘Class will out.’ That’s British, you know.
June 7th, 2009 at 7:50 PM
The peelanders sure are infatuated with AKM, ain’t they, Aussie?
Perhaps they is like 3rd graders… when they have a crush, they act like idiots. My take on it is that vido etc. have a massive crush on AKM. Luck girl
June 7th, 2009 at 8:22 PM
[...] Palin Plagarizes- You remember that speech up there? The one listed for Thursday? Well, turns out she didn’t write it all by herself. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. Yep, that’s what I [...]
June 7th, 2009 at 8:46 PM
Is SP dense?, oops I mean is she stupid?, I mean does she not realize that people read and will recognize that the speech sounds familiar?, I am not shocked at what that female does, maybe Bristol receiving her HS diploma was given the job of speech writer. I hope know one in the government body helped to write the speech that is now recognized around the country of being Newt/shirley plagarized by -Failin Palin.
June 7th, 2009 at 8:49 PM
Breaking News 2 american journalists are given 12 years in N Korean Labor camps. Really upset by it, which brings to mind SP having a degree in Journalism and can’t even write or edit a speech. These women are real journalists in a Rogue Nation and this demwit is perpetrating a fraud.
June 7th, 2009 at 9:52 PM
12 years!!!! oh my, Demetria! As a working journalist since 1982, I’m beyond upset about this. What country was working on negotiations for them? (Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark? I can’t remember….sigh)
June 7th, 2009 at 9:56 PM
I hit “return” too fast. I’ll check in the morning and see who to contact about continuing negotiations. It’s 2 am here and has been a long day on the farm. Just finished shelling a “few pounds”
of peas (they were more like a ton of peas!)
June 7th, 2009 at 10:02 PM
Austin in Texas… dident she already ‘boink’ an intern? Who was Brad Hanson, anyway?
June 7th, 2009 at 10:24 PM
KateinCanada: Turnitin.com is a subscription service. It’s not cheap and most teachers don’t subscribe to it individually, paying for it out of their copious discretionary income. It’s usually subscribed to by the school district or school site and teachers have access to it that way. It used to be you were allowed one freebie to test the site, but that was when it was new. No more freebies.
You would think that major new organizations would subscribe so their journalists would have an easier time checking for…..”research” (as Tom Lehrer would define it.)
June 7th, 2009 at 10:40 PM
And now she’s been “uninvited” to speak at the fundraising dinner. Could it be because Newt is now the keynote speaker and no one wants her to plagiarize him that night?
June 7th, 2009 at 11:20 PM
Palin attorney demands that ADN remove the story regarding this subject and they are complying. It has been taken down from the front page of the ADN.
http://community.adn.com/adn/node/141649
June 7th, 2009 at 11:21 PM
Those peelanders have somehow gotten a copy of the letter sent by Palin’s attorney to the ADN editor and have a copy up on their site, yet I have been unable to find it elsewhere.
http://conservatives4palin.googlegroups.com/web/ltr+Hulen+FINAL+compressed%5B1%5D.pdf?hl=en&gda=Kt7NL1cAAACPgrsFYYeNCJc2VCWrdAoAPMXlCGHy6_jg6ZM9fqBfGEiujO5XiP7kOSDy8LizerkCIqfSnSzCwoAoukLUxiSsYZqzEd7hr7z69NT6IftdMXleHbr-qQzBoYYWXY0JTQM&gsc=mdgOewsAAACLDnWp0EGd6z4PkKkb_zOj
June 8th, 2009 at 12:19 AM
I betcha two cents that because she mentioned Newt’s name at the beginning, and again at the end, she’s going to wriggle out of any repercussions. Serious ones, anyway. It’s not going to be a pre-iceberg iceberg, at any rate.
It didn’t sound to me like she gave him “credit” for the quotes (however mangled) scattered throughout most of her speech, but what do I know?
June 8th, 2009 at 12:25 AM
I’m banned at see2pee!
I can’t read ANY of their ludicrous remarks! 
But I did go to the ADN article for a few laughs.
Perhaps it would be a wise investment for the see2pee folks to purchase a dictionary and look up the word “plagiarize”. They might be astounded to see that their Queen is GUILTY AS CHARGED.
They keep saying, “SHE MENTIONED HIM TWICE!” However, she didn’t do so as she was butchering his words and neither did she cite the co-author – and equal contributor to the work.
If you guys see any REALLY funny posts at see2pee, please post them here so I can laugh along with you!
(PS: I’m banned because of my opinion that showing 90% of her thighs at the Memorial Day event was inappropriate and that the shoes are UGLY. What I find most amusing over there is that they delete or ban ANYTHING that doesn’t fall lock step in line with their dementia. Do they not LIKE the Constitution or what? What about that whole “Free Speech” thing? It just makes them look like babies throwing hissy fits.)
Off to HuffPo to see the chaos over there!
June 8th, 2009 at 12:28 AM
Nan: OF COURSE she’ll wriggle out of this! She has very expensive and demanding attorneys on her side that are threatening libel. And she has the base of the base who will die for her.
That’s all she needs… that and the corrupt Personnel Board.
June 8th, 2009 at 12:30 AM
BTW: She says the article was “recent”. Why? It’s almost 4 years old.
Don’tcha think maybe she was hoping no one would actually FIND it and compare her word salad to the original work?
June 8th, 2009 at 12:57 AM
samper, I thought it was funny that while at nuts4nitwits they were claiming “she looked like she was dressed for church,” the photo they chose to post of the Memorial Day event had her standing behind a huge bunch of flowers so you could see very little of her legs and none of her shoes. Apparently they were afraid to show the picture Shannyn & Phil had (or link to it for proper attribution) lest their crowd see the inappropriateness of her attire for themselves.
I also suspect that telling people the article was recent when clearly it wasn’t might have been an attempt to make it harder to find if they did look for the original work. Actually, if she had paraphrased it all to make it less recognizable, she might have gotten away clean, and if she had said she was going to read an article by Gingrich and Shirley and done so verbatim, it would have been perfectly fine.
I bet her attorney just loves it every time she does something unethical – more fees for him. He’ll be able to retire soon at this rate.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:22 AM
samper, sorry to hear you were banned over there. I read but have never commented. Don’t ever intend to either. I watch what they are saying & doing since despite their comments that they have no connection to Palin or her administration, they are able to get a lot of information really fast, sometimes before it shows up elsewhere.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:53 AM
Am I off base to think that not only should Palin have identified both authors, but also, since she used one source and so extensively, that she should also have identified the publication and publication date? Is that being too picky?
June 8th, 2009 at 5:07 AM
Not for nothing: many people plagarize!
Palin not at fault here. Yes, her speech writers PERHAPS could/should have identifed the source. BUT Palin has to steal the idea and declare them as her own. Not sure we’ve got that here. Now that you all but declared her a plagarist have you given her action for libel? Hmmmm, just wondering…
June 8th, 2009 at 7:13 AM
let it run, I’m no attorney, but if a court determined she plagiarized the material, I don’t think the “everybody else is doing it” defense would help her much. I also doubt blaming it on the speech writers would work, since ultimately we are responsible for what comes out of our mouths, regardless of who told us to say it.
I have no idea whether a charge of plagiarism would stick in a court of law in this case, but there has been no argument, even from her own attorney, about how extensively she used that article or that it was the sole source from which her speech was prepared, and there is no question that she did not identify the name of the publication, publication date, or co-author.
We would have gotten roasted (and rightly so, I believe) by our teachers if we had so extensively relied on someone’s work, particularly a single work, and for not making it clear whether we were paraphrasing or quoting as we went along. We would have been considered unethical and lazy for not doing our own homework. Illegal or not, it seems unlikely she would want to let people know the extent to which she borrowed from a single 3.5 year old article instead of coming up with her own thoughts, especially since she has been previously criticized for being an intellectual lightweight and has touted her journalism degree. I suppose anything is possible, though.
June 8th, 2009 at 7:56 AM
I wrote my graduate thesis on “Marketing Post-Secondary Educational Institutions” at a Christian College (Spring Arbor University). How I came about it was that, when I graduated Magna Cum Laude, I wasn’t courted by the graduate program to continue. But I digress.
One of the requirements of the thesis was to provide at LEAST 50 sources, even though the requirement for length of the thesis didn’t have to be anywhere near that comprehensive. The purpose was to have a well rounded knowledge of the subject matter and on both sides of the issue.
My, and everyone else’s, thesis was LARGELY just compiling the information and cohesively constructing it all into a coherent argument. We all discussed our work at length in that class for a semester and all pretty much constructed our final papers the same way.
I went back to look at mine. It’s got to be 90% reference to other published work! The thing is crazy with footnotes of attribution to original authors, including date, publication, page numbers, quotation marks, etc.
MY work was done in consolidating the “best” and most widely accepted methods and arguments and then paraphrasing the overwhelming agreement on … you guessed it … the “best” way to market a university and its programs to graduates from HS and Undergrad programs alike.
I didn’t claim to know this stuff… I claimed that I put together information from many sources to create a thoughtful strategy for universities.
I got an A. And I didn’t have to plaigiarize to do it. And it wasn’t really all that difficult, either. I read, documented, summarized and put it together.
Why would such a thing be so difficult in the preparation of a 17 minute speech? Why can’t she just take the article, appropriately attribute her words as being gleaned from that work, and THEN give her 2-cents worth of original thought?
Different “Repub Strategist” (man, they have ALOT of those out there!) just on MSNBC says (again paraphrasing): She’s quoting a four year old piece on words uttered 30 years ago. The Repubs have to STOP looking back, STOP looking to Reagan, and start with their OWN stuff.
BTW: With those plaigiarism databases and thoughts to get a hold of her prior “work”: First, the databases didn’t exist when I was in college, but it seems that a prof would have to … what? Scan the entire document and feed it into a program?
Also, I had ALL my papers returned… the college didn’t retain any of them. The see2pee’ers keep wanting to see President Obama’s work from his university days and I wonder just how they think a university can release something I’m sure they didn’t retain. Harvard CERTAINLY doesn’t retain every piece of work from every student! They’d have to have entire buildings devoted to nothing but storage!
Besides that, the student wouldn’t have had the work returned with critique. Back in the day, “copies” weren’t made (although mine was on a disk, I still have the only hard copy produced. I feel pretty confident that my prof didn’t stand at the copier duplicating each student’s paper… he’d have been an old man before we got them back!).
June 8th, 2009 at 8:50 AM
OMG! ON MSNBC RIGHT NOW!
Yet ANOTHER “Repub Strategist” (Cheri Jacobus) and her points, summarized, lest I be accused of plaigiarism):
SP is a self made woman!
She didn’t come from a political family, a family with money, she didn’t marry into it.
She was the VP candidate! (Again, when can we put this to rest? She is JUST a Gov now!)
If they think they are going to “nudge her aside” at the dinner tonite and she’ll walk away quietly, they are underestimating her.
They SHOULD make room for her!
They know that if she were to come into power, some of them wouldn’t have jobs (they are AFRAID of her!).
She’s a threat to Obama and folks are going to see that they are ready to get rid of the teleprompter (what IS it with these people and teleprompters? SP had a fist full of “notes” for her ill-delivered speech on Wed that she CONSANTLY was LOOKING DOWN at to read… how is that ANY different from having a teleprompter?)
It was an “introduction”, and you can find it with EVERYONE (like this makes it right). Bios are all the same, so words sounding similar are inevitable (me, paraphrasing).
This wasn’t a “bio” of Michael Reagan, idiot! It was barely an introduction. It was a SPEECH by Palin that she got almost verbatim from other printed work that was not duly recognized!
Dorian Warren (Dem Strategist):
Repubs are in disarray if they can’t make room for her … It’s akin to dissing Obama and replacing with Lieberman. I guess, in other words, he thinks that the party, also too, should have made room if she is such a “star”.
IMHO: She shouldn’t BE a star if she can’t make a simple dinner decision and stick with it. These things are planned, choreographed, timed, practiced, etc. She can’t just waffle back and forth willy nilly!
They need to get more organized and with ORIGINAL thoughts… good luck to them on that!
June 8th, 2009 at 10:42 AM
Samper:
1. Sarah has no idea how to do proper research.
2. Sarah has no idea how to provide a proper citation.
3. Someone who cannot string together a coherent sentence isn’t likely to be able to correctly attribute sources so an audience can differentiate between citations and original thought.
4. Sarah has no original thoughts. (One might question if she has any thoughts at all, given the strings of adverbs, adjectives, etc that seem to have no focus or point.)
I think #4 is probably the most important.
A woman who obviously slept her way to a bachelor’s degree is no matchh for Obama. Sorry, but the GOP can go ahead and put her up as their candidate. She is NO threat to Obama. And will be even less so in 2012. But they may do it anyway because she is a throw away candidate. They are sure to lose in 2012 and may not want to taint any viable candidate they may have for 2016, so they’ll need a sacrificial lamb. And she won’t even realize that’s why she’s chosen. She’ll actually believe it’s because she’s the “best” candidate. She’ll even believe she’ll win. Poor thing. I’m looking forward to the train wreck. Should be very entertaining.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:45 AM
Turnitin.com was around 4 years ago. It was around 10 years ago. And they don’t have to scan the doc in. You just type in a phrase or a sentence. Turnitin scans the entire web for similar docs.
Anyone remember the Harvard student with the publishing deal that “borrowed” from several different books for her novel? Made the media big time. Wonderful example of how paraphrasing is still plagiarism.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:52 AM
CNN has picked it up! Rick Sanchez commenting on did she plagarize.