Mr. Integrity.
The latest from Sen. Scott Brown might not actually make the minor scandal of
portions of his website being wholly lifted from former Sen. Elizabeth Dole's website go away. He says
the intern did it. Really.
“It was a summer intern that put together the site, we corrected it once we found out, and we’re working on trade agreements and jobs,” he said.
The Massachusetts Republican, who faces re-election next year, took the offending language off his website yesterday after a Democratic group called American Bridge 21st Century drew attention to the passage and said Brown had plagiarized Dole, the former North Carolina senator.
Brown did not say whether he had ever seen the pasage on his website or whether he previewed the lifted words before they were posted in his name. The passage, which was directed to students visiting his site, was the sort of political autobiography that is meant to inspire.[...]
Brown said today that a young intern launched the site when his office had “very little time and resources to put things up.”
Right, because U.S. Senators have such limited resources. How this helps Brown isn't really clear. First, even if an intern did, it's still plagiarism. Second, he had interns putting together his Senate website? Were they not supervised? Nobody proofed it?
But there are still the problems with the timeline Brown's office is using.
Marcie Kinzel, a spokeswoman for Brown, told Reuters on Thursday that the senator’s website hasn’t been updated since around Feb. 2010 when her boss took office.
One Democratic source told POLITICO that this timeline clearly doesn’t match up with the senator’s claims, since February would have been “well before any ‘summer intern’ would have been onboard.”
“It seems Sen. Brown’s office is so busy trying to cover their tracks that they forgot to get their story straight before talking to the press,” the source said.
Summer comes really early in Massachusetts? Can Brown keeping digging to make himself look any dumber than he does now in this story? Let's try to give him the benefit of the doubt, here. Maybe when he says it was a summer intern he means it was one of Dole's summer interns who wrote the copy.