Bloomberg’s Heilemann: Melania Plagiarism Worse than Biden, Obama
Is There Nothing a Liberal Does that the MSM Won’t Find Some Way to Defend?
John Heilemann came up with a strange way to defend Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and to attack Melania Trump, for the plagiarism in speeches each of them gave.
On today’s Morning Joe, Heilemann argued that Biden and Obama’s plagiarism wasn’t as bad, because they ripped off fellow liberals: Neil Kinnock and Deval Patrick, respectively. In contrast, passages in Melania’s speech came from a 2008 Michelle Obama speech. Per Heilemann, that made Melania, or the person who prepared those passages for her, a “moronic plagiarist.” Heilemann omits one important thing: Melania is the wife of the candidate, for whom English is not even her second language. In contrast, at the time they gave their plagiarized speeches, Biden and Obama were presidential candidates themselves. They were almost certainly directly involved in the plagiarism.
Heilemann- Melania Plagiarism Worse Than Biden’s, Obama’s Cause They Ripped Off Fellow Liberals from Mark Finkelstein on Vimeo.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: So it’s worth remembering that in 2008 Hillary Clinton’s campaign accused Barack Obama of plagiarizing then Massachusetts Governor Duval Patrick during a speech in Milwaukee. Obama said he should have credited it to him. And in 1987, remember this, Senator Joe Biden plagiarized a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock, leading to more revelations —
JOE SCARBOROUGH: But it was a good speech. Seriously, if I were going to plagiarize a speech it would have been Neil Kinnock’s speech.
MIKA: What frustrates me is Melania’s story and Melania in her own words is very effective. I think a lot of that was, obviously. She speaks multiple languages. She could have done so much with it and some jerk put in a speech from Michelle Obama’s 2008. How does that happen?
JOHN HEILEMANN: Can I just, can I put out the reason that this person is going to need to be fired, because they’re too stupid to be employed. For Joe Biden to plagiarize Neil Kinnock is wrong. But Joe Biden is a Democrat, Neil Kinnock is a Labor party politician.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Right.
HEILEMANN: The same thing’s true with Barack Obama and Deval Patrick. Somebody got it in their mind when they were under pressure, stressed out, trying to get this speech together for her to cut and paste Michelle Obama’s speech at the Trump campaign! What are–I mean, it’s one thing to be a plagiarist, it’s another thing to be a moronic plagiarist.
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“Cultural appropriation!”
ROFL!
The ultimate truth left to die an orphan is that neither Michelle Obama or Melania Trump wrote their speeches.
Both merely uttered the words placed before them.
All this misadventure beggars is whether Melania Trump will decide what is in our kids school lunches.
In the meanwhile, everybody is talking about the Trumps and the RNC convention.
A couple more nights like this and over 50 million will tune in for Donald’s acceptance speech.
“All this misadventure beggars is whether Melania Trump will decide what is in our kids school lunches.”
Yeah, I don’t see that happening.
On the contrary, the First Lady is a de facto trend setter for women’s fashion, to which Mrs. Trump would be the greatest thing since Jackie O. Goodbye Gorilla arms!
Everybody is NOT talking about Trump. However, for those who would like to see some kind of substance… One thing we are not talking about is Bhengazi.
The Benghazi mother whose son was murdered in her speech to the convention yet again stated Hillary lied to the affected families faces. Which caused Chris Mathews to soil himself on national TV.
What are you talking about?
Do you even know anymore?
I know she spoke at the convention. However, the focus is not on her, the focus is on the Trump brand.
In 2008, the aspiring First Lady was accused by bloggers of lifting lines for her DNC speech from Saul Alinsky.
Plagiarism, eh? I love the smell of desperation in the morning. (Ooh! Ooh! I plagiarized that, almost! Quelle horreur!)
Pretty boilerplate words for a very pedestrian sentiment. If she has to dodge around everyone who’s said something similar in a speech delivered in English, she’d be accused of bombastic circumlocution.
These guys are improvising. We can make a pretty good guess that they were planning to attack her for reading somebody else’s speech off the teleprompter. (Of course when Obama does that, it’s totally fabulous … but that doesn’t mean it rubs off on anyone else.) Now, however, they have something, feeble though it may be, which they can attack … but they have to pretend that they’re confident that it’s her speech, and not somebody else’s. If it’s somebody else’s, what can they be implying? That we shouldn’t vote for the speechwriter for President? I wasn’t planning to, anyway.
Trumps people claim she wrote the speech. To me, that claim is more interesting. Trump even needs to embellish by claiming she wrote the speech. It would have been quite acceptable to say that it was her thoughts, but she didn’t write it because English is not her native language. But they continue to maintain that she wrote it!
The major knock of Trump is that he lies and grossly embellishes every aspect of his life, positions, solutions and accomplishments. How big is the wall? 20 feet? 30? 50? How long is his nose?
BTW, it was plagiarism. It doesn’t matter that the sentiments were platitudes. The phrasing, in multiple places, is virtually the same. It doesn’t matter who else has done it. Both left and right jump to ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘2 wrongs make a right’ when they don’t have an argument.
Not quite accurate. Melanie said she wrote with as little help as necessary. However how much help was necessary was never defined. Her speech was fantastic and the more the media piles on the more women voters will become sympathetic.
John Heilemann is a stupid tool for the left!
This whole dust up is a nothing burger.
The whole Morning Joe bunch is sucking off the democratic party teat. Pigs at the feeding trough
A few overlapping words and phrases out of thousands. The Democrats are desperate to sustain the war on women. First, they came for Palin and reduced her to a Fey caricature.
Choose abortion, not life.
I’m confused. Wasn’t it a first lady plagiarizing a first lady?
Sounds the same to me.
So the Democratic War on Women continues!
First, they disarmed the babies… and cannibalized her parts.
They reduce Palin to a Fey caricature. With the female chauvinist revolution, and now [selective] “=”, they reduced them to reproductive prostitutes.
Poor Melamine…
http://patterico.com/2016/07/19/melania-speechwriter-rickrolls-gop-convention/
It’s funny, but there are a couple of serious issues that this reveals.
First: whoever wrote that speech is a mole. The insertion of the Michelle Obama plagiarism was no mistake. The speechwriter is trying to embarrass the Trumps. And they don’t mind making it perfectly obvious.
Second: it reveals just how pathetic the Trump campaign’s denials of the obvious plagiarism really are. Here’s the official statement:
Screen Shot 2016-07-19 at 7.28.43 AM
Here’s Chris Christie:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former prosecutor, brushed off the controversy surrounding Melania Trump’s convention speech, saying he wouldn’t be able to make the case for plagiarism, “not when 93 percent of the speech is completely different.”
Here’s Paul Manafort:
“This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down,” Manafort asserted on CNN.
“There’s no cribbing of Michelle Obama’s speech. These were common words and values, that she cares about her family, things like that,” Manafort said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “I mean, she was speaking in front of 35 million people last night. She knew that. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama’s words is crazy.”
It’s gaslighting, of course, because the speechwriter blatantly did crib Michelle Obama’s words, in much the same manner that a not-so-bright third grader might crib from Wikipedia…”
____________________________________________________
Hi-larry-ous…!!!
The American public has never cared that much about plagiarism, only academics care.
Unless some democrat is willing to accuse Melania of being insincere or not meaning what she said, the issue doesn’t matter. Sometimes other people have written beautiful words that express our feelings better than we can express them ourselves.
It was a good speech and this pseudo scandal allows Trump to dominate the airwaves, getting his message across. The visuals are so great for Trump that you have to suspect that he did this on purpose (he pulled similar stunts during the primaries and the over eager gotcha press gave him huge publicity). Already, NBC is running split screens of Melania vs Big Mooch. How can that possibly hurt Trump? Instead it will only benefit him.
Plus, If the democrats, especially democrat men, continue to attack Melania, Trump’s numbers among women will only go up.
Melania just Rick Rolled the press. She even said the words!
The folks who care the most are the ones who actually own intellectual property.
Americans probably care more about authenticity than any other nation on Earth.
Of course, nothing stays the same and we are getting more and more fundamentally transformed daily, and the one taking us further and further away from what our country has been is the one yelling “Make America great again”.
Yawn. A simple apology and blame an anonymous speechwriter. And then you can say something like: “overall it’s a very different speech and this is what I (or Melania depending on who is talking) want to emphasize.” And then you get a chance to double down on your message.
I can understand how this happened. First of all I do not have the patience to listen to any speech given by Mrs. Obama so I wouldn’t know if what I wrote was patterned after a speech that I did not hear given by a person I would rather not watch.
Now, as for Melania, I could watch her watching paint dry.
It should be obvious from this manufactured “outrage” that the MSM and Dems see Melania as a serious threat to Clinton. Let’s see: Grace, charm, poise, beauty versus HRC’s… well you can fill in the blanks.
Raggsie ;
One thing’s for damned sure. Ain’t nobody gonna plagiarize from our boy Raggsie. Ain’t nobody as angry, bitter, full of hatred & lies, foul mouthed, predictable, unpleasant, ego driven, ponderous, bloviating, always right, etc., etc., etc, as our boy Queer Pierre!
You son, are a true piece of work. Or a piece of something else I can’t remember what.
I’m one of your downchecks.
You’re not doing anything at all to keep the comment section out of the gutter.
Mariner ;
Thank you, it’s good to know you gave me a down vote. Don’t you feel better now? You made a stand for civility & good taste.
Have you ever down voted Raggsie when he’s told someone he’ll fluck them in the ear, mouth, nose, or other bodily orifices? Or any other of his numerous slanders?
Sorry, I haven’t noticed if you have.
My first thoughts when seeing the headlines about the ‘plagiarism’ were:
a) what parent HASN’T said those things to their children?
b) this is too easy… Trump is punking the media again.
Sure enough, today I see reports that Mooch riffed those lines from… wait for it….. Saul Alinsky!
Anybody who sees my comments here knows I’m not a Trump fan, but his ability to repeatedly bitch-slap the living shit out of the prog media is a tremendously entertaining thing.
Wow! This liberal idiot really missed a chance to go after Melania for racism. I mean michele obama is black and a white woman “Stole” her words! That is nothing but racism! The fact that many millions of people have said, “Work hard, keep your word, treat everyone fairly and if you do this only your imagination or your dreams can hold you back”, in one form or the other is so obvious that this whole thing is silly and made up.
Of course the issues by a SPOUSE must be worse than an ACTUAL CANDIDATE
If only that were true there would be no clinton’s at all!
Political speeches are usually nothing more than boring generalities with the listeners each hearing what they want to hear. Very few speeches are memorable or epic. At some point, given the sheer number of speeches, they are all going to sound alike. No one is daring enough to come up with something new.
Gabby Morrongiello @gabriellahope_
(!) RNC spox @seanspicer quoting My Little Pony on CNN to defend Melania Trump plagiarism controversy
12:40 PM – 19 Jul 2016
105 105 Retweets
86
http://twitchy.com/sd-3133/2016/07/19/hold-your-horses-rnc-spox-offers-up-best-defense-yet-for-melanias-plagiarized-speech/
This is just SOOOOOOO damned T-rumpian.
We can expect LOTS more of this. Imagine these people with actual power.
Hummmmmmm! Rags, your principles are taking quite a beating this year.
Maybe you can take pride in knowing that you forced The Professor to ban Trump Supporters (Really?). Hummmmmmmmmm, maybe you missed one! Must be your extreme old age, or is it fast approaching Alzheimer’s?
Pity, more for losing your principles than anything else!
Well, Doug, I never did what you are accusing me of doing. Ever.
Gary (the liar) Britt did once physically threaten me (offered to come here to my town to kick my ass), and I never even reported that to Prof. Bill. Britt just lost his shit, and was a moron.
Gary (the liar) Britt DID call Fuzzy a “filthy whore” on this blog, along with being the slimiest purveyor of nasty bullshit lies about the Cruz family on these threads, and the Prof. just had his fill, I reckon.
It was none of my doing. If he’s back under a different name, he’s violating the terms of use in a pretty big way. Based on a number of factors, I’d say that is exactly the case.
BTW, I thought you promised never to have any communications with me. Speaking of principles.
Gary Britt sure did manage to kick your arse all up and down the LI threads. I guess that makes you a super moron in addition to being a childish foul mouthed moronic child.
As I recall he called BS on your phony claim of threats and called your bluff about posting a link to the post which you never did.
He did exactly what I said he did.
I was never about to cull through his volumes of posts, and he knew that. He was a profligate liar, and you are one, too.
I can tell you it was shortly before the holidays last year, and I thought it would be bad form to send him back to Austin in a body bag.
So you admit you have no proof and want us to just take your very questionable word for it. Gotta call BS.
No, you lying sack of shit. The post, and my response, exists.
If you have any integrity, you’ll research my claim, which you won’t find too hard. It’s obvious you’ve spent considerable time on me, and have some research skills you’ve misused.
Which is kind of sick.
Rags, it still comes down to your one and only principle, that you do not tolerate any opinion different than your own.
Try growing up and try understanding that others, many, many others, have opinions and views that do not agree with your twisted view of life.
Go back and huddle with those who cannot accept that the GOP primary process worked, not with the result you desired, yet it worked well. The democratic practice followed by the GOP primary might not be perfect, yet it worked and what more can be asked of it?
It’s a pity that LI has now become a blog ruled by Rags and Milhouse and that the Professor has become a mere footnote in its history.
Begone, foul Rags, begone! Your petulant style becomes no one, not even your own putrid self.
“Shut up!”, he explained.
Never has worked, Doug. Never will with me.
Nor do your lies about me.
Apparently, my memory is far superior to yours. You broke your promise. Too bad about your “principles”. Mine are fully intact.
Upvote 4 Doug.
Hmmm, seems like there’s something else I could do. . . ..
The above prediction brought to you by Rags the same self important moron who absolutely guaranteed Cruz would stay in it to the end and challenge the credentials of every single Trump delegate literally 2 minutes before Cruz dropped out of the race. LMAO.
That’s a lie, and you’re a liar.
You’d be laughing your dick off if you had one…
Exact quote from Rags just before Cruz drops out:
“Cruz is in this now to the convention.
He WILL…and damn well SHOULD…challenge the credentials of every stinking T-rump delegate.”
Here’s the link:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2016/05/live-results-indiana-primary/#comment-671921
“…absolutely guaranteed…”
“…literally two minutes…”
Dickless.
…Proven LIAR..
Yes. You are.
You forget, moron, I do this for a living.
When I have a stupid witness on the stand who makes the kinds of over-reaching statements you have, I cut them to pieces.
Juries don’t like liars.
Well that could explain your inability to keep your company solvent and having to close its doors. Did you file for bankruptcy protection?
Based on your posts I seriously doubt you ever passed the character and fitness exam to get a law license or ever won a jury trial if you did.
You lied about your laughable prediction regarding Cruz staying in it to the end just 2 minutes before he dropped out of race. Plain and simple.
Now you’re lying about me lying when anyone who can read can see I didn’t, you did, and you’re an idiot.
Dickless.
Michelle during speeches in Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin on February 18, 2008, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”
Melania….well you get the point.
She’s obviously proud to be an American and Trump’s wife
I’m don’t know why anyone would knowingly copy Michelle at anything
When you argue with an idiot, you have two idiots arguing.
Why is anyone dignifying this?