Amanda Terkel over at Think Progress catches John McCain plagiarizing large portions of his foreign policy speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council yesterday. Sizable chunks of it were lifted directly from a speech made by retired Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer in 1996, and apparently it's not the first time he's lifted from Ziemer. It also appears that some of the parts that weren't stolen from someone else were merely recycled from a speech McCain himself gave in 2001, back before the Iraq War even started. I'm not sure what I should be most concerned about though -- the plagiarism, or the fact that McCain couldn't come up with anything new to say.
UPDATE: Think Progress has updated their post to note that Ziemer’s speech may have been plagiarized from McCain, who apparently used those lines in 1995. Which means that they're all recycling each other's old lines. This doesn't make me feel any better.
--Kate Sheppard
