Some of you will remember that Joe Biden's 1988 bid for the presidency was felled when he plagiarized a major speech from the British politician Neil Kinnock. Now, via Think Progress, McCain looks to be risking a similar fate. Turns out quite a bit of his foreign policy speech yesterday was stolen, without credit, from a speech Admiral Timothy Ziemer's gave in 1996. What's particularly telling is where the lifting happened -- in the section where McCain explained his deep hatred of war. Turned out it wasn't quite his after all. If that section of the speech, which seemed so very personal, was in fact anything but, than what can we really take from the address? The point of the speech was that McCain's core beliefs militate powerfully against war. But that's not true for his policies and, we now learn, those aren't strictly his core beliefs. This seems like a big deal to me. Think Progress now has a correction up: "It appears that Ziemer’s speech may have been plagiarized from McCain. According to the McCain campaign, the senator used these lines before Ziemer — in 1995. We regret the error." So many plagiarists...
