Um ... oops?
Hey, remember when publishers would pull books off the shelves after their crackpot authors
had been shamed and discredited?
Several more sections of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s 2012 book Government Bullies appear to be plagiarized from articles by think tank scholars, BuzzFeed has found. [...]
As was the case with the other cut-and-pasted jobs, Paul included links to the works in his book’s footnotes but made no effort to indicate that the words themselves had been taken from other sources.
The four newly discovered lifts come from works published by the Cato Institute, a clipping from an
Environmental Protection article, and a Forbes article. In each case, the lifts were near-verbatim, with the "near" part probably owing to Paul's unwitting editor correcting "his" text. None of them top the three full pages of Heritage text found earlier, but heaven knows how many more will be found. Paul's book is beginning to look like a phony fossil skeleton creatively reconstructed from the bones of a hundred other animals. Maybe it will turn out to be a giraffohipposaurus!
Not-shockingly, most of the people and places Paul swiped text from (1) ideologically on Paul's side of the aisle and (2) are considerably less concerned with Paul passing off their copyrighted work than they would have been if it were you or I stickyfingers-ing our way through their archives:
“Our ideas got in the book, we got credited in the notes. So that seems like a good thing for a think tank,” David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, said after BuzzFeed was asked to call him by Paul’s office when reporting on the first instance of plagiarism Saturday.
Nor does the publisher seem concerned, which seems considerably more unusual. They say they'll be properly attributing the quoted sections in future printings of the book (presuming somebody can actually find them all, which isn't something anyone ought to be betting on), but are otherwise standing behind Sen. Stickyfingers. I don't think that's the usual reaction to demonstrated plagiarism, but I suppose the issue here is that nobody is particularly eager to hold their movement figureheads to basic ethical standards? If you started down that road, after all, who knows where you'd eventually end up.