But he did attribute it. He just attributed it to the wrong person.
Further, the book it came from purports to be non-fiction. This isn’t a story someone made up, it’s something that actually happened. If I tell you that the Visigoths once sacked Rome, I’m not plagiarising Edward Gibbon.
This is the website for the book. My initial impression was that it was just some conservative glurge, but that was wrong. The author wasn’t making a political point, and that’s clear in the original version of the story: Maurice just asks for lunch in a brown paper bag instead of money. There’s no conservative bullshit about handouts in the original story. So to that end, Anderson would appear to be guilty of plagiarism and basic dishonesty. Ryan’s just full of it for thinking this would mean anything even if it were true.
Okay, so perhaps a better analogy is, “If I told you that the Polynesians once sacked Rome, I’m not plagiarising Edward Gibbons.”
Yes, please. Fighting over academic footnotes is not seeing the forest for the trees. Paul Ryan is a repellent human being, and it’s about time the DC commentariat started highlighting garbage like this and make him pay a social price for it.
And when it comes to this story, the choice for the child isn’t “government-provided school lunch” vs. “brown paper bag lunch from mom”, it’s "government lunch’ or “no lunch”. The fact that conservative Randroids like Paul Ryan would twist that simple fact into yet another cudgel to smack the working poor from his perch on Mt. Galt shows what a pathetic, morally-bankrupt person he is. And this is the man the GOP tapped to be our next Veep. Frank Underwood is a better choice.
In the linked video, Ryan says:
And that’s exactly what happened. On July 31, 2013, Anderson testified in front of Ryan’s committee on Capitol Hill, and relayed the story.
So Ryan did not “steal” the story – he credited the source as that source represented it to him.
Eloise Anderson seems to have stolen it, and I believe she has no admitted she “misspoke.”
[/quote]
But of course that’s not what happened, is it?
Should I draw any conclusions about liberals simply because you incorrectly accused Ryan of stealing the story? Or do you get a pass? I’m inclined to think you get a pass, since you, in turn, were misled by the linked source.
Now, as to Ryan’s underlying point:
I am, as a general principle, opposed to handouts of money. But this story does not describe a handout of money. It describes a handout of food.
I agree with the idea that the kid would probably have been happier if he got a brown bag lunch from home every day. But that seems to have been impossible, for whatever reason. (I didn’t get the implication that the child was unloved – just that his home was, for reasons unclear, unable to send him to school with a brown paper bag lunch.) So the choices seem to be: go hungry, or eat the school-provided lunch. Surely the latter is a better outcome.
In short, I have no clue what the hell Ryan was trying to say with that story.
But I know he didn’t steal it.
Why is it that I am able to say that my political opponents are generally good people, but simply armed with very different ideas about the proper role of government?
And at least some of my political opponents believe that their opposition are repellent human beings, pathetic and morally-bankrupt?
The oft-quoted phrase that conservatives think liberals have bad ideas, and liberals think conservatives are bad people, comes to mind. This is not a rule, of course – I have only to click over th anncoulter.com to see similar vitriol leveled against liberals.
That’s one of many reasons I am not a fan of Ann Coulter.
But my objection applies to this kind of thing, as well. Why can’t the criticism of Ryan’s ideas win the day? Why must the adjectives be dialed up to eleven?
I post criticisms of liberal politicians here. I don’t use words like that in describing them; I criticize their positions and plans. It’s possible I’m forgetting some tirade I may have launched into at some point, but I don’t think I am.
Your statement contains an assumption that both sides are equal, and that the differences are simply ones of how to tackle problems.
The trouble is, that for some years now, the GOP has swung the balance.
Because Ryan’s ideas specifically aimed at hurting children so that they parents will “step-up” and make them lunches.
He assumes that children without brown-bag lunches are the result of lazy parents, and the problem will fix itself if you stop coddling the parents by feeding their children.
That may be the result of a simple flaw in his ability to reason, but in real-world terms it will needlessly increase human misery.
He’s wrong, and is essentially a 13th century doctor who has decided that the patient needs to be bled and sprinkled with aromatic herbs. His prescription isn’t based on reality, and will only make the problem worse.
Again, you assume that both sides are equal. If you put mainstream Dem positions against mainstream GOP positions, one side wants to help people, and the other wants to remove that help. It’s easy to see why passions don’t get legitimately inflamed about Dems. Who are democrats trying to screw? Billionaires?
The catch is that the New Jerusalem will still be divided and contested between Jews and Muslims. What, you didn’t think the problem would go away that easily, did you?
Good post, Bricker. I agree with you in general.
If I had my way, I’d put a muzzle on the 10-20% of the most extreme in both parties–the firebrands, the bomb-throwers. Then let the rest of us–the middle, work together to make compromises that further the goal of moving along our 200+ year experiment in democracy.
We have to get over letting the extreme cause us to hate the middle of the opposition.
Bob Barker: “Please spay and neuter your pets.”
GOP Guy: “Bob Barker, that fucking liberal wants to get rid of all pets.”
RO SDMB Guy: “GOP Guy accused Bob Barker of wanting to kill people’s pets.”
SDMB Resident GOP Apologists: “Since you lied about what GOP Guy said and all lies are equivalent, GOP Guy is now absolved of any lies he told.”
Absolutely right.
We also discussed this over in The Pit yesterday, in the Stupid Republican Idea of the Day thread.
Washington Post did a Fact Check on his story, and gave both Ryan and the woman he got the story from Four Pinocchios each.
Here is my post summarizing that, which includes a link to the WaPo FactCheck story.
ETA: WaPo called it the “story too good to fact-check”.
And now the Inuit, too.
For this, Mr. Ryan. And the horse upon in which you rode.
There is precious little evidence that 60% to 80% of the public is in broad agreement about the issues and ready to compromise. And “precious little” is putting it kindly.
No, there is not broad agreement about the issues. But I believe there IS broad agreement that the issues can be best discussed without recourse to calling our opponents evil, traitors, or whatever other appellations might be hurled by either side.
Mark your calendar: this is a relatively accurate tu quoque presentation by Shodan. Biden indeed plagerized back in the late 1980s when he was running for President. He didn’t make it out of the Democratic party alive, because his fact based doesn’t put up with this sort of crap. Joe Biden plagiarised Neil Kinnock speech
There’s gotta be a statute of limitations on this kind of stuff.
Yeah, I’m giving Ryan a pass on this one. That said and not incidentally, this is a bullshit story. I’ll repost Senegoid’s 4 Pinocchio WAPO link. It’s one of those few urban myths that you can trace back to the original story and track the mangling each step of the way. Admittedly there’s an underlying point -the human touch and parental love is essential. But the original story involved an female executive helping out a panhandling homeless kid with a drug addicted Mom during the 1990s. The kid didn’t say, “Don’t help me out ma’am”. Rather the discussion went like this: At one point, Schroff offers to bring Mazyck lunch every day so he won’t go hungry. The exchange goes like this:
[INDENT]“Look, Maurice, I don’t want you out there hungry on the nights I don’t see you, so this is what we can do. I can either give you some money for the week – and you’ll have to be really careful about how you spend it – or when you come over on Monday night we can go to the supermarket and I can buy all the things you like to eat and make you lunch for the week. I’ll leave it with the doormen, and you can pick it up on the way to school.”
Maurice looked at me and asked me a question.
“If you make me lunch,” he said, “will you put it in a brown paper bag?”
I didn’t really understand the question. “Do you want it in a brown paper bag?” I asked. “Or how would you prefer it?”
“Miss Laura,” he said, “I don’t want your money. I want my lunch in a brown paper bag.”
“Okay, sure. But why do you want it in a bag?”
“Because when I see kids come to school with their lunch in a paper bag, that means someone cares about them. Miss Laura, can I please have my lunch in a paper bag?”[/INDENT] It would be rather bizarre to interpret this story as an attack on the safety net. None of the principles saw it that way. Again, I’m willing to cut Ryan slack on this one -my outrage meter is pegged at zero- but the anecdote as presented was nonsensical at best.
False equivalence, sam. Sometimes the problems really are bunched on one side. Who is the Democratic bombthrower? Bernie Sanders? Please. I can think of exactly one Democratic Congressman who maybe matches your description, and he has precious little influence.
Saying “Both sides do it”, when one side goes as far as filibustering their own bill so as not to lift the debt ceiling - well that could be part of the problem. Right? Another example. Book, by 2 longtime political observers from Brookings (left leaning) and AEI (right winging, but not as much as Hoover).
Oh, I dunno. I think 60%+ would be willing to compromise. We know this because Republicans misrepresent themselves as non-obstructionists on TV, while they are more candid in print. Tea Partiers aren’t numerically huge.
OTOH, a lot of this is driven by extensions of the modern conservative direct mail machine pioneered by Viguerie during the 1970s. The other aspect is conservative TV and talk radio, where you can assert assert assert what you want in a factually indifferent environment.
OMG. I’ll edit.
Nominated for least appropriate username-content combination.