Can there be a more important issue than Melania Trump’s plagiarism?
I usually don’t watch convention speeches or speeches in general, but I was curious about two last night and decided to watch them. Neither was so very long, and both were interesting.
The first was Guiliani’s fiery anti-Hillary pro-Trump shoutfest, in which he really roused the rabble. And I mean that in a good way:
The second was that of Melania Trump, wife of Donald. I was curious about her not because I saw her speech as important, but because I wondered what she was like, whether she’d be nervous, what she’d wear, that sort of thing.
Now, you might say such concerns of mine were trivial, and I wouldn’t disagree on that. But hey, a lot of what catches our interest is that sort of thing; we’re human, after all.
Here’s the speech:
Afterwards I thought I was going to write a little blurb about Melania’s speech in which I would say that she did a good job at seeming beautiful and sexy, dignified and calm, foreign and domestic, and altogether riveting when she narrowed her beautiful eyes and looked sternly into the camera for emphasis. She gave out the aura of a Bond Girl in one of the older Bond movies featuring all those statuesque vaguely-European beauties with the chiseled features, the hot bods, and the take-no-prisoners attitudes.
Well, I’ve just managed to sneak that paragraph in there before getting to what is apparently the biggest and most important story of the day, which is that the speech Melania delivered contained several lines and phrases identical with some in the speech Michelle Obama delivered back in 2008 at the DNC. The MSM and blogosphere and social media coverage of this issue (some of which you can see here) is hot, heavy, and relentless—and although nearly meaningless, it may or may not be damaging to Trump depending on whether the American people care.
I sure hope they don’t, but you never know with Twitter nation.
If you want the details of the purloined speech and the exact phrases involved, see this. The lifting is of phrases so hackneyed and mundane that they could have been computer-generated, so it’s hard to see why anyone would want to borrow them. But it does seem that someone did.
That someone, however, would not be Melania Trump, who almost undoubtedly did not write the speech. It would be her speechwriter, who should be fired (Reince Priebus agrees with that latter sentiment).
This was not Melania’s doctoral dissertation. Nor was it her short story, or novel, or newspaper column, or anything she wrote that could make a person care about whether a paragraph of it was plagiarized or not. Nor was it any more important than the fact that Joe Biden gave a speech that plagiarized that of a British politician—somehow he has managed to become VP despite that, and the MSM seems rather calm about it—or when the Great Orator Obama himself cribbed lines from Deval Patrick (see this for those stories and others along the same line).
To me, a politician or his/her speechwriter borrowing a few lines in a prepared speech is of such small importance that I haven’t made a fuss about it even when the error was committed by a candidate I bitterly oppose, such as Obama. Now, if that person were found to have plagiarized work in an academic paper such as a thesis—and if the borrowing is not a careless error of failure to attribute but is in fact a real effort to pass the work of another off as one’s own—that is more serious (not to mention outright cheating in college such as acts that got Ted Kennedy suspended from Harvard). Still, on the list of transgressions of which politicians are regularly guilty, plagiarism of parts of a prepared speech barely registers on my radar screen and I don’t seem seem to have covered it except to mention a couple of times that Biden once got into trouble for it.
And these are candidates, for goodness sake. Melania Trump is a candidate’s wife.
I did write a couple of posts about plagiarism, but they were all about academics or journalists accused of plagiarism in their writings, not in their speeches, and sometimes involving a lot more “borrowing” than was present in Melania’s speech (see this, for example, as well as this and this). These people are supposed to be resting on their journalistic or academic laurels and writing their own work, so it’s of more importance for them who wrote what (and even there, I have given them somewhat of a pass when the errors appear to be careless ones).
There is no comparison to what happened last night with Melania. But the press adores catching any Republican in any sort of gaffe, and it gives them an excellent excuse to ignore just about everything else that happened at the convention that may have impacted negatively on the Democrats or on Hillary Clinton.
[NOTE: Did Melania’s speechwriter also include a rickroll in the speech? If so, I’m starting to wonder whether the speechwriter was a mole. Who was this person? Haven’t read anything about that, but a lot of other people are wondering, too.
Prior to giving the speech, Melania claimed she wrote it with “as little help as possible.” That certainly doesn’t mean she didn’t have a speechwriter. Most people need help writing a speech like that, and they get it.]
Much ado. I agree that it is curious that anyone would “borrow” any phrase from Michelle Obama. You have to wonder what was going through the head of the culprit, if anything.
Too bad. I also agree that she projects the image you described. I know nothing about her intellectual capacity, but she would certainly project an attractive image of an immigrant American to the world. She was very poised.
(Short discussion yesterday with my daughter, with whom I never discuss politics. She wondered aloud how the people who criticized Michelle Obama for going bare armed as FLOTUS, would react to Mrs Trump, who went mostly bare. I responded that the bare arms were the least of my objections to Michelle Obama, although I did cringe at her bounding off of Air Force One (the people’s airplane) in shorts after yet another flight to a vacation destination.)
Off topic. I saw Mike Pence’s speech this morning. To this point, I knew of him only through his reputation. Very impressive speech. I would say exceptional. If given the opportunity, he will be a great asset.
There was little criticism from the left when, some years ago, there surfaced evidence of plagiarism from Charles Ogletree and Lawrence Tribe at Harvard Law. Had they been students and done anything comparable, they would have been expelled, but, being famous and leftist (and, in the case of Ogletree, black), they did not face any consequences.
j e:
I wrote about that issue some years ago. In the present post (paragraph beginning “I did write a couple of posts about plagiarism, but they were all about academics or journalists”) I included a link to my previous piece. But in case you missed it, it’s this.
See, Trump should hire more family members to do the tasks he can’t trust the RNC or his Democrat pals to do.
The problem with trying to get away from Leftists and Democrats, after being a Democrat for some 50+ years for Trump there, is that a lot of his associates are not who he thinks they are. So a lot of the “networking” and recommendations Trump would normally trust for greedy businessmen, he can’t trust to run as President for the RNC. Then again, I’m sure Palin has that figured out by now.
I find the theory of sabotage to be intriguing. I wonder if a deep mole Never Trumper has embedded somehow.
Never, ever give up. Sounds like one of Churchill’s speeches to me.
I wonder if a deep mole Never Trumper has embedded somehow.
I wonder if Trump’s Democrat friends helped him out a bit here, just for old time’s sake. Like the way Trump helped out the Clintons during the primary season.
Janetoo:
Bwaaahaahaa! No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I find the theory of sabotage to be intriguing. I wonder if a deep mole Never Trumper has embedded somehow.
—————–
Wouldn’t need to be a Never Trump person. Due to the specialized skillsets, there are plenty of individuals doing the background stuff on political teams that you’re invariably going to get a few who vote for the candidate running against their boss in the actual election. Dick Morris is probably the best known example of this.
Of course, such individuals typically manage to submerge their political opinions while actually doing their job because otherwise they don’t get paid. The fact that someone may have not done so is troubling.
She comes across as described. I was impressed by her delivery. Unlike the insufferable MO, she refrained from mentioning for the first time I am proud of my country.
RG would make a great AG.
Neo: “Afterwards I thought I was going to write a little blurb about Melania’s speech in which I would say that she did a good job at seeming beautiful and sexy, dignified and calm, foreign and domestic, and altogether riveting when she narrowed her beautiful eyes and looked sternly into the camera for emphasis. She gave out the aura of a Bond Girl in one of the older Bond movies featuring all those statuesque vaguely-European beauties with the chiseled features, the hot bods, and the take-no-prisoners attitudes”
Just so. It seems so improbable that such a woman may become the First Lady. But everything about this campaign seems improbable.
As to the plagiarism. The phrases are such political boiler plate that the speech writer may have written them from memory of other such speeches and not realized the words were identical. Anyway, Michelle and her speech writer should be flattered. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Or something like that.
It seems as if this screwup might not be too bad after all. My guess is some speech writer reviewed a lot of old speeches of spouses and took notes (copy and paste) with the intent of re writing and using good points from various speeches. In all probability the next person up the chain picked up the notes and made an assumption they were original, which they were not, and incorporated them while taking credit for writing the whole speech.
Now, overall this is not a bad thing because Melania is today’s top topic in the news cycle with others to blame for the mistake. This takes the focus away from the never-trumps and other grumps and like her husband Melania benefits from the publicity.
I would imagine that a lot of folks in the country who are in the undecided are enjoying the showmanship and entertainment and the Trumps will come out of this gaining more percentage points in the polls.
Let’s see what the next few nights bring us with this week’s “Greatest Show in the Whole Daman Wide World”.
Thank God she didn’t plagiarize Michelle’s Princeton thesis. The turgid, Neo-Marxism-meets-Black-Studies rhetoric would have put everyone to sleep so deeply not even Giuliani yelling could have roused them. The MSM, however, would have loved it and praised Mrs. Trump for having “grown” or “matured” (LibSpeak for “become more like us).
I would imagine that a lot of folks in the country who are in the undecided are enjoying the showmanship and entertainment and the Trumps will come out of this gaining more percentage points in the polls.
I find fault with Trump’s excessive Democrat allegiances plus his personal flaws, which are not suitable to lead a nation under God’s grace or protection. Well this nation is going to hell, so the last one doesn’t count any more.
Still, I think OldTexan’s analysis is very close to the mark of truth there. The Alt Right can spin this a number of ways, very easy to do, especially with “Michelle” being the supposed origin point.
Once before, whites and then blacks gave to the Demoncrat party the keys to this Republic and or Kingdom, and this Republic was destroyed as a result of transfering moral, economic, and military power to the Demoncrats. If Republicans survive under Trump as free will moral agents, it will require a miracle. Well, miracles don’t happen in a nation committed to sacrificing millions of humans for profit and fun. Aztecs didn’t get too much out of their blood magic in the end.
By making a mountain out of a molehill, the MSM can minimize coverage of anything said that doesn’t fit the narrative.
Right on cue, all of my lefty-left “friends” were running wild with this all day today. As you all know, I’m no fan of Trump and have no special attachment to his wife, but this incident showcases what horrible, worthless trolls most leftists actually are to such an extent that I am fuming.
For just a glorious moment, I contemplated excoriating them, shoving their nose in the juvenile hypocrisy of referring to another woman as a bitch and other, worse, female slurs. As I’ve mentioned, I refrain quite a bit in this forum, as I respect Neo and her guests – you don’t want to be on the receiving end when I finally do get angry. These – I shall call them “people” in lieu of what they deserve to be called – preen about how wonderful and enlightened they are, and how sexist, racist and bigoted we conservatives are, yet no one I know uses sexist, racist or bigoted insults as often as leftists.
For some reason, I held back and remained silent.
Roughly the same originality as in a high school principal’s graduation speech, Certainly not enough to be the subject of a copyright suit.
I guess the Eloi figured bashing the content of her speech would be “xenophobic” and “sexist,” so they fastened on this item.
Since the sentences that are common between the speeches are things that our parents might have told us too, we were wondering if anyone checked if Michelle Obama (or her speech writers) took the sentences from some other author or speaker.
My mother was Latvian and English was her 4th or 5th language. When she had to write anything, she would always draft it and have me review it for proper spelling, grammar and meaning. Whenever she visited her relatives, who had moved to Australia & New Zealand, we had to ask what new phrases she learned. What was an innocent phrase down under sometimes had a very different meaning in the US.
The speech had to been reviewed by someone else, so she was probably hacked.
Neo,
Yet another media concocted tempest in a teapot.
Had the media only gone into a similar feeding frenzy when the idiot Biden plagiarized a speech given four months earlier.
Or perhaps these times.
After watching the media do backflips to justify Loretta Lynch’s accidental meeting with Bubba on an airport tarmac no less, then Comey’s refusal to prosecute Clinton when he has prosecuted others for less, one could say, at this point what difference does it make?
One thing I didn’t hear , is “for the first time in my adult life, I feel proud of my country.”
Bruce Says:
July 19th, 2016 at 8:25 pm
Since the sentences that are common between the speeches are things that our parents might have told us too, we were wondering if anyone checked if Michelle Obama (or her speech writers) took the sentences from some other author or speaker.
* * *
Indeed.
If so, you will never hear about it from the New York Times.
These — I shall call them “people” in lieu of what they deserve to be called
I call them zombies. Easier to avoid hating them. Eliminating them is necessary, hating them, even from the Christian morality, may not be.