By now everyone has heard about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul plagiarizing the work of other writers in his speeches, books, and op-ed columns. The senator's reaction to the story is evolving: it began with denial; morphed into attacks on Rachel Maddow, who first reported the story; now his staff is busy scrubbing stolen material from his website (what they'll do about Rand Paul's books and other printed articles is as yet unknown). So far, though, no actual apology.
In this otherwise funny Wonkette article on Rand Paul's clumsy "Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?" response to the charges, I'm seeing something a bit more disturbing: the beginnings of a general right-wing rejection of accepted academic standards on attribution and plagiarism.
In the Wonkette article, for example, a spokesman for the conservative Heritage Foundation, which published one of the research papers Rand Paul copied and used in a speech, is quoted as saying: "We like when people cite our work. We wish more progressives would cite our work, maybe then they wouldn’t be so progressively wrong.” Of course Rand Paul did not cite the Heritage Foundation, instead presenting their work as his own ... but never mind.
Wonkette goes on to quote the editor of The Week, a magazine from which Rand Paul also plagiarized, who says: “We’ve always known that the audience of The Week consists of smart, busy people who want to feel even smarter, including a lot of people on Capitol Hill … We’d like to thank Sen. Paul for his endorsement.” Never mind that by stealing work from the magazine and misrepresenting it as his own, what Rand Paul did was pretty much the opposite of endorsement.
The very people Rand Paul stole his material from are lining up to defend and protect him. What this tells me is that universally-accepted academic standards on research and attribution are about to join evolution and science in the growing pantheon of UATRDHTBI (Universally-Acknowledged Truths Republicans Don't Have to Believe In). Conservatives are now telling us they're fine with plagiarism ... so long as it's one of their own doing it. The shorthand for that, of course, is IOKIYAR (It's Okay if You're a Republican).
Do I even need to mention what the IOKIYAR crowd will do if some poor Democrat, liberal, or leftist gets caught doing what Rand Paul just did? Joe Biden might have some thoughts on that subject.