Oooooops.
It looks like Sen. Rand Paul
does indeed have a plagiarism problem:
An entire section of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s 2013 book Government Bullies was copied wholesale from a 2003 case study by the Heritage Foundation, BuzzFeed has learned. The copied section, 1,318 words, is by far the most significant instance reported so far of Paul borrowing language from other published material. […]
In this case, Paul included a link to the Heritage case study in the book’s footnotes, though he made no effort to indicate that not just the source, but the words themselves, had been taken from Heritage.
Lifting over a thousand words—three full pages of text—for your own book? Yeah, that ain’t copying a few phrases from Wikipedia no more. That’s a double-barreled cut-n-paste. Presumably, when some poor delusional sucker out there is out to buy a book featuring the deep wisdom of Rand Paul, they’re looking for the deep wisdom of Rand Paul, not the deep wisdom of the Heritage Foundation lifted wholesale because Rand Paul was too damn lazy to retype anything himself and had
way too many pages left to fill.
In another instance in the book, several sentences appeared similar to a report by a senior fellow at the Cato Institute Mark Moller in the National Wetlands Newsletter. Moller said he had not given anyone permission to reprint any parts of his article.
Damn, this thing was apparently quite the (unintentional) group effort.
Sen. Paul, for his part, is responding in the only fashion the Paul family has ever learned: by turning the batshit knob to eleven and threatening to duel people who bring it up:
”[I] take it as an insult and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting. I have never intentionally done so.”
He continued, "And like I say, if, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can't do that, because I can't hold office in Kentucky then.”
I can actually envision Sen. Rand Paul pacing off with reporters with old-timey pistols, ready to defend his honor over the matter of whether or not he’s allowed to lift entire pages of other people’s work and pass it off as his own. I really, truly can.
