Everybody’s least favorite toy soldier, disgraced former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, took time away from dodging culpability in the death and abuse of prisoners under his watch to rush around at breakneck speed trying to fix up and retain his master’s degree in “security studies” at Naval Postgraduate School. Back in May of last year, CNN investigated and found that Clarke’s master’s thesis, "Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible,” had 47 instances of plagiarism. That’s like … a ton of plagiarizing.
As you might expect from someone as incompetent and navel-gazing as David Clarke, the plagiarizing was pretty blatant, including crediting sources with footnotes while not using quotation marks in instances where he “was using the language verbatim,” which is pretty much the definition of plagiarizing. CNN followed up through a Freedom of Information Act request and found that over the last 10 months, pretend tough guy Clarke has made “several extensions of resubmission” to push back the deadline while he “revises” his joke of a masters thesis.
Some highlights include:
- Clarke thought he was “unfairly targeted and was never taught properly" how to … you know, not plagiarize stuff.
- By the summertime, school officials were so frustrated they just wondered why Clarke didn’t just sit down and spend a week making the revisions they asked for, instead of whining about his baseless case.
That highlight includes this sweet, sweet bit of awesome:
The official added, "(Clarke) has dined out quite a few times on the 'I was never taught this stuff' cant, and I'm about done with it. The implication is that twenty-odd of his classmates somehow received the wisdom through osmosis or implication."
- When Clarke finally did submit revisions in December, school officials remarked to one another that the “fixes are extremely superficial.”
- And Clarke, for his part, bitched and moaned about the “never ending process,” like a five year old who doesn’t want to practice letters.
In the end, with a good deal of handholding, the once-potential nominee for head of Homeland Security, did what he should have done in the first place, not plagiarized. Only the “best people.”