Re Melania’s speech: IT’S OBVIOUSLY HILLARY’S FAULT!
C’mon, people, use your heads. :smack:
They aren’t quite identical, no…but many of the words, and the phrasing, are the same, and I find it very, very hard to believe that it was anything other than intentional plagarism.
I’ll be very curious to see how the Trump campaign handles this today, because Manafort’s initial reaction was pretty lame. Anything other than “yes, someone lifted these lines, and that person has been dismissed from the campaign” shows an even deeper lack of morals than Trump’s campaign has already shown (and I didn’t think that that was possible).
I do think it’s important that we’re reminded now and then about this. I suppose you can defend the content of Melania’s speech, but the purpose of the speech is indefensible. I can’t believe that even someone married to that creature would want him to become President of the United States. Assuming she has become a citizen of the U.S., she should put the needs of her country over her personal and her family’s ambitions.
They’re common sentiments, but there are a million ways to express those sentiments. What are the odds that Michelle and Melania (and their respective speechwriters) would express them in almost exactly the same words?
I agree that the odds of deliberate fuckery by speechwriters seem high. But I think it’s far more likely that they gave this to the least qualified person on their clown car of a speechwriting team, who really did think he had changed enough words that people wouldn’t notice he lifted the whole graf from Michelle, and who thinks the Rick Roll is still a thing.
The rickrolling makes me think a speechwriter was deliberately screwing with the speech, either for a laugh or because they wanted to actually sabotage it.
It’s obvious plagiarism. I can’t believe that anyone is sincerely arguing that maybe it isn’t. Of course, I’m not surprised that the Trump campaign and surrogates are arguing otherwise but it’s blatant.
Melania claims to have written her speech so she’s either a plagiarist or a liar. Either way, it’s an embarrassment to the campaign. And that’s the real issue for Trump: The one story anyone is talking about this morning is how his wife ripped off a speech from Michelle Obama. When she concluded last night, it was about she did a good job and about Giuliani’s speech and now it’s just everyone pointing and laughing at what a dumpster fire this whole thing is.
And I think mocking her accent is shitty. Conversely though, I see people who seem to be giving her the benefit of the doubt based on some bizarre fantasy that some naive girl from Slovenia could never do such a thing by herself. What, they don’t have people in Slovenia who lie, manipulate or steal? She’s not Cousin Balki – she can probably steal shit intentionally even without a sneaky speechwriter sabotaging her.
It reads exactly how school children write when they are told they can’t quote directly, minor differences, but, and this is the important part, all the content in the exact same order. If there were some differences in the “general, vague sentiments” and the order they were presented you could call it “some commonality in wording and turns of phrase”, this however is straight up plagiarism.
Yep. It reads exactly like that. I would have at least changed the order of the sentiments a bit and not cribbed phrases like “your word is your bond” (which, while a cliche, it sticks out to me like a sore thumb) for plausible deniability.
And, now, satire is truly dead:
The fact that the plagiarism (and rickrolling!) are so obvious are signs that the Trump campaign really doesn’t have a process for this kind of thing. And I think they’re also signs that they were deliberately included by the speechwriter, either as a personal joke of some sort or as intentional sabotage (the kind that would have been picked up by a professional campaign operation, but that probably easily slips through Trump’s amateur process or lack thereof).
Yes, that comes across as Freshman year level “putting in your own words” by merely changing a couple of articles and inserting fillers.
However, the audience IS likely to buy in to the “it’s just common phrases” explanation and I would not blame them, because, and I’ll have to dock Michelle’s writers for that too, it used what to many who have been listening to a lot of campaign speeches sounds by now like boilerplate language.
Also, because what sort of writer would dare put one over on Trump the Great and Mighty.
Goofy hypothesizing - how do you think Donald is acting towards Melania and her writers today?
-Is he pissed at this obvious unforced error?
-Is he comforting her, saying it could have happened to anyone, or that the evil pressfolk are being unfair?
-Is he gleeful about another crazy distraction which is giving his campaign unprecedented publicity at a time that it seems there is no such thing as bad publicity?
-Other possibilities?
-Is he taking a long trip down a river in Egypt?
From that article:
OMG. Plagarism is acceptable, if there’s only a little bit of it? Seriously?
If Melania’s speech had been this close to a speech that someone had made at some university, or some convention of teachers, or some other place, then I’d be more willing to consider it might be coincidence, even though I’d still find that unlikely. But since it was a speech that the current first lady made at her party’s national convention, it seems much more likely that an inexperienced speech writer googled “first lady speech” and used it as a big starting point, or someone in Trump’s camp was deliberately sabotaging things. And like you said, since there is also a Rickroll in the speech, I’m leaning more towards the sabotage angle.
Nobody thinks Melania wrote the speech herself, nor should she. She’s a bright woman, fluent in several languages, and she’s perfectly capable of doing it, but it’s expected that for such an occasion she’ll have professional help. One would assume that they first sought her input for what she might want to include and the overall theme, they’d make a draft and she’d make comments and after several cycles of drafts, comments, and practice sessions they’d be done. It’s malpractice on the part of the speechwriters to commit plagiarism and I don’t blame her a bit for it, I blame the incompetent campaign staff. They’re paying these people good money and they should be able to avoid plagiarizing.
What was more disturbing was that the mother of a Benghazi victim has either become a professional victim or she’s being exploited and manipulated by Republicans into lying about Hillary. There simply was no stand down order, and to state that there was and that this caused her son’s death was a dirty lie.
Remember when the Republicans lambasted Joe Biden for plagiarism? Neither do they.
This is the Trump campaign. Probably not.
Did you catch that Donald called FoxNews for an interview during the mother’s speech?
Yes, there’s a reason that candidates shun the spotlight during their conventions, they don’t want to divert the attention from their own infomercial. Of course, the Donald apparently can’t breathe unless he’s in front of a camera.
They didn’t need to. His own party and media coverage was enough to cause him to drop out of the race over the issue.