Sarah Palin signing ILY - cool - Page 8

jillio · 11-02-2008, 12:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Reba

Not unlike Biden who didn't know that it wasn't FDR who was in office at the beginning of the Great Depression, or that television broadcasting wasn't yet available for FDR's national speeches.

YouTube - Biden FDR Gaffe
Biden makes FDR gaffe during CBS interview -- Newsday.com

Or this revelation:

"'Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America,' Biden said Wednesday in Nashua, New Hampshire. 'Quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me.'"

Or:

"This is the fellow who nearly derailed his nascent presidential campaign last year by calling Obama bright and clean and articulate and who noted that you needed a slight Indian accent to walk into a Dunkin' Donuts or 7-11 in Delaware."
Biden living up to his gaffe-prone reputation - International Herald Tribune

And I would consider this to be far less important than stating that one can see Russia out one's back door.

Or not being able to name a single Supreme Court case that she agreed with. Or to name a single newspaper or magazine that she read on a regular basis. Or to understand and be able to articulate the duties of the position she is running for. Or having aids restrict her from answering questions from the members of the press traveling with her because they are afraid of what she might say if she is not thoroughly indonctrinated prior to speaking. Or of having been found guilty of abuse of power while in office. Or of having become effectively during her campaign, a national joke.

Hear Again · 11-02-2008, 12:47 PM

Jillio,

You ought to tell Wakamuka that Ohio is a battleground state. When I tried to tell him/her that, they told me I needed to pay closer attention to politics.

Since you live in the state of Ohio, I figured it would do some good for Wakamuka to hear it "straight from the horse's mouth."

jillio · 11-02-2008, 12:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hear Again

Biden is certainly more capable of answering hard questions better than Palin. Palin can't even conduct a one-on-one interview without looking foolish and speaking in incomplete sentences.

"And this is what we will do about that, doncha know? You betcha! *wink, wink*

Hear Again · 11-02-2008, 04:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jillio

"And this is what we will do about that, doncha know? You betcha! *wink, wink*

You gotta love Palin! If she isn't worth anything else, at least she's worth a good laugh!

Reba · 11-03-2008, 02:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liebling:-)))

Past is Past, period.

Ooooh, that was deep.

Reba · 11-03-2008, 02:19 PM

Since this happened in "the past" I suppose no one will care that Biden is a plagiarist.

Quote:

Why Biden's plagiarism shouldn't be forgotten.
By David Greenberg
Updated Monday, Aug. 25, 2008, at 1:35 PM ET

Teachers and scholars consider the unattributed use of someone else's words and ideas to be a very serious offense, but the public doesn't seem to mind much, at least when it comes to politics. The incidents of plagiarism and fabrication that forced Joe Biden to quit the 1988 presidential race have drawn little comment since his selection as Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate—just as revelations of plagiarism by Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin scarcely hurt their book sales. In 1987, before Biden quit the race, he called the incidents "a tempest in a teapot." Although most reporters disagreed then, at least enough to pursue the story, they seem now—perhaps jaded by two decades of scandal-mongering—to have come around to Biden's view.

But Biden's exit from the 1988 race is worth recalling in detail, because his transgressions far exceeded Obama's own relatively innocent lifting of rhetorical set pieces from his friend Deval Patrick, which occasioned a brief flap last February. Biden's misdeeds encompassed numerous self-aggrandizing thefts, misstatements, and exaggerations that seemed to point to a serious character defect. In some ways, the 1988 campaign—in which scandal forced not just Biden but also Gary Hart from the race—marked a watershed in the absurd gotcha politics that have since marred our politics and punditry. But unlike Hart's plight, Biden's can't be blamed on an overly intrusive or hectoring press corps. The press was right to dig into this one.

In the 1988 race, Biden began as a long shot. But after Hart dropped out in May 1987 over the exposure of his affair with Donna Rice, none of the remaining "seven dwarves" in the Democratic field pulled away from the pack. Biden's youth and vitality—as well as his tutelage by Patrick Caddell, the pollster-consultant considered a veritable magician by insiders—made him a decent bet to reach the front of the pack. Over the summer, the rival campaigns of Michael Dukakis and Dick Gephardt became concerned as Biden ticked upward in the polls.

Biden's downfall began when his aides alerted him to a videotape of the British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, who had run unsuccessfully against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The tape showed Kinnock delivering a powerful speech about his rise from humble roots. Taken by the performance, Biden adapted it for his own stump speech. Biden, after all, was the son of a car salesman, a working-class kid made good. Kinnock's material fit with the story he was trying to sell.

At first Biden would credit Kinnock when he quoted him. But at some point he failed to offer the attribution. Biden maintained that he lapsed only once—at a debate at the Iowa State Fair, on Aug. 23, when cameras recorded it—but Maureen Dowd of the New York Times reported two incidents of nonattribution, and no one kept track exactly of every time Biden used the Kinnock bit. (Click here for examples of Biden's lifting.) What is certain is that Biden didn't simply borrow the sort of boilerplate that counts as common currency in political discourse—phrases like "fighting for working families." What he borrowed was Kinnock's life.

Biden lifted Kinnock's precise turns of phrase and his sequences of ideas—a degree of plagiarism that would qualify any student for failure, if not expulsion from school. But the even greater sin was to borrow biographical facts from Kinnock that, although true about Kinnock, didn't apply to Biden. Unlike Kinnock, Biden wasn't the first person in his family history to attend college, as he asserted; nor were his ancestors coal miners, as he claimed when he used Kinnock's words. Once exposed, Biden's campaign team managed to come up with a great-grandfather who had been a mining engineer, but he hardly fit the candidate's description of one who "would come up [from the mines] after 12 hours and play football." At any rate, Biden had delivered his offending remarks with an introduction that clearly implied he had come up with them himself and that they pertained to his own life.

Most American political reporters were not so attuned to Britain's politics that they recognized Kinnock's words. But Michael Dukakis' adviser John Sasso had seen the Kinnock tape. Without his boss's knowledge or consent, he prepared a video juxtaposing the two men's speeches and got it into the hands of Dowd at the Times, David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register, and NBC News. When the story broke on Sept. 12, Biden was gearing up to chair the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's far-right nominee. Biden angrily denied having done anything wrong and urged the press to chase after the political rival who had sent out what came to be called the "attack video."

Unfortunately for Biden, more revelations of plagiarism followed, distracting him from the Bork hearings. Over the next days, it emerged that Biden had lifted significant portions of speeches from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. From Kennedy, he took four long sentences in one case and two memorable sentences in another. (In one account, Biden said that Pat Caddell had inserted them in his speech without Biden's knowledge; in another account, the failure to credit RFK was chalked up to the hasty cutting and pasting that went into the speech.) From Humphrey, the hot passage was a particularly affecting appeal for government to help the neediest. Yet another uncited borrowing came from John F. Kennedy.

If that wasn't bad enough, Biden admitted the next day that while in law school he had received an F for a course because he had plagiarized five pages from a published article in a term paper that he submitted. He admitted as well that he had falsely stated that British Labor official Denis Healey had given him the Kinnock tape. (Healey had denied the claim.) And Biden conceded that he had exaggerated in another matter by stating in a speech some years earlier that he had joined sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters, and was thus actively involved in the civil rights movement. He protested, his press secretary clarified, "to desegregate one restaurant and one movie theater." The latter two of these fibs were small potatoes by any reckoning, but in the context of other acts of dishonesty, they helped to form a bigger picture.

For all these disclosures, Biden remained unbowed. "I'm in the race to stay, I'm in the race to win, and here I come," he declared. That meant, of course, that his days were numbered. Newsweek soon reported on a C-SPAN videotape from the previous April that showed Biden berating a heckler at a campaign stop. While lashing out at the audience member, Biden defended his academic credentials by inflating them, in a fashion that was notably unbecoming and petty for a presidential candidate.

"I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect," Biden sniped at the voter. "I went to law school on a full academic scholarship." That claim was false, as was another claim, made in the same rant, that he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. Biden wrongly stated, too, that he had earned three undergraduate degrees, when in fact he had earned one—a double major in history and political science. Another round of press inquiries followed, and Biden finally withdrew from the race on Sept. 23.

The sheer number and extent of Biden's fibs, distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at the time as worrisome, to say the least. While a media feeding frenzy (a term popularized in the 1988 campaign) always creates an unseemly air of hysteria, Biden deserved the scrutiny he received. Quitting the race was the right thing to do.

Twenty-one years on, how much should Biden's past behavior matter? In and of itself, the plagiarism episode shouldn't automatically disqualify Biden from regaining favor and credibility, especially if in the intervening two decades he's not done more of the same, as seems to be the case. But no one has looked into it. The press should give his record since 1988 a thorough vetting. It's worth knowing whether the odds-on favorite to be our next vice president has truly reformed himself of behavior that can often be the mark of a deeply troubled soul.

***

Note: In an article about plagiarism, crediting sources seems especially wise. I relied on three books about the 1988 campaign: Jack Germond and Jules Witcover's Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars?: The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988; Sidney Blumenthal's Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War; and Peter Goldman and Tom Mathews' The Quest for the Presidency 1988, along with articles from the New York Times and Washington Post.

1) Kinnock: "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get into university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get into university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry? The people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn't they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand."

Biden: "I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest? Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? No, it's not because they weren't as smart. It's not because they didn't work as hard. It's because they didn't have a platform upon which to stand."

Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden's Debate Finale: An Echo From Abroad," New York Times, Sept. 12, 1987.

2) Robert Kennedy: "The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Biden: "We cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It doesn't measure the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our public officials. It counts neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. That bottom line can tell us everything about our lives except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except that which makes us proud to be Americans."

Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden Is Facing Growing Debate on His Speeches," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1987.

3) Kennedy: "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."

Biden: "Well, few of us have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can act to affect a small portion of events, and in the totality of these acts will be written the history of this generation."

Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden Is Facing Growing Debate on His Speeches," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1987.
David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.

Why Biden's plagiarims shouldn't be forgotten. - By David Greenberg - Slate Magazine

Hear Again · 11-03-2008, 06:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Reba

Since this happened in "the past" I suppose no one will care that Biden is a plagiarist.

Why Biden's plagiarims shouldn't be forgotten. - By David Greenberg - Slate Magazine

Nope. Don't care.

To be "fair and balanced," I don't care about McCain's past either.

Daredevel7 · 11-03-2008, 06:56 PM

Wow.... all this talk about gaffes and stuff people have done in the past (however seemingly insignificant). It seems like in order to please most people, a president MUST be goody goody in EVERY ASPECT in his/her life since birth and avoid any possible relationships with ANYONE who possibly can do a teeny bit of bad. And also be absolute perfect in what s/he says and what s/he does!

The process of being a president is kinda hard!

Hear Again · 11-03-2008, 07:57 PM

Well, two things I expect from my President are being able to communicate effectively and having a decent knowledge of U.S. geography. Is that too much to ask? I don't think so.

And Reba, don't bring up the fact that Obama said there were 50 states in the U.S. because it's obvious that Palin has made more gaffes related to geography than Obama.

jillio · 11-03-2008, 10:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hear Again

Jillio,

You ought to tell Wakamuka that Ohio is a battleground state. When I tried to tell him/her that, they told me I needed to pay closer attention to politics.

Since you live in the state of Ohio, I figured it would do some good for Wakamuka to hear it "straight from the horse's mouth."

I've already done so.

jillio · 11-03-2008, 10:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hear Again

Nope. Don't care.

To be "fair and balanced," I don't care about McCain's past either.

JFK was guilty of plaigarism, as well. He stole a line, or rather his speech writers did, from Kahlil Gibran in one of his most famous speeches. Did it affect his ability to lead this country? I think not.

Hear Again · 11-03-2008, 10:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jillio

JFK was guilty of plaigarism, as well. He stole a line, or rather his speech writers did, from Kahlil Gibran in one of his most famous speeches. Did it affect his ability to lead this country? I think not.

That's true, Jillio. In fact, many people consider JFK to be one of the best Presidents America ever had.

Hear Again · 11-03-2008, 10:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jillio

I've already done so.

And Wakamuka still didn't believe you? Oh well...

jillio · 11-03-2008, 10:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hear Again

That's true, Jillio. In fact, many people consider JFK to be one of the best Presidents America ever had.

Exactly. And only a handful are even aware of his plagiarism.

Liebling:-))) · 11-04-2008, 07:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Reba

Ooooh, that was deep.

I can see that you live in the past.

Liebling:-))) · 11-04-2008, 07:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Reba

Since this happened in "the past" I suppose no one will care that Biden is a plagiarist.

Do you have the problem for that?

Don't you know that McCain is also plagiarist as well?

11-02-2008, 12:47 PM	#212 (permalink)
Hear Again Each day is a gift. Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 20,073 Blog Entries: 6	Jillio, You ought to tell Wakamuka that Ohio is a battleground state. When I tried to tell him/her that, they told me I needed to pay closer attention to politics. Since you live in the state of Ohio, I figured it would do some good for Wakamuka to hear it "straight from the horse's mouth." __________________ Left ear - Nucleus 24 Contour Advance with Freedom BTE (Implanted: 12/22/04 \| Activated: 1/18/05) Right ear - Nucleus Freedom (Implanted: 2/1/06 \| Activated: 3/1/06) Deafblind/Postlingual

11-03-2008, 07:57 PM	#219 (permalink)
Hear Again Each day is a gift. Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 20,073 Blog Entries: 6	Well, two things I expect from my President are being able to communicate effectively and having a decent knowledge of U.S. geography. Is that too much to ask? I don't think so. And Reba, don't bring up the fact that Obama said there were 50 states in the U.S. because it's obvious that Palin has made more gaffes related to geography than Obama. __________________ Left ear - Nucleus 24 Contour Advance with Freedom BTE (Implanted: 12/22/04 \| Activated: 1/18/05) Right ear - Nucleus Freedom (Implanted: 2/1/06 \| Activated: 3/1/06) Deafblind/Postlingual

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11-03-2008, 06:56 PM	#218 (permalink)
Daredevel7 Adrenaline Junky Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Huntsville, AL Posts: 1,937	Wow.... all this talk about gaffes and stuff people have done in the past (however seemingly insignificant). It seems like in order to please most people, a president MUST be goody goody in EVERY ASPECT in his/her life since birth and avoid any possible relationships with ANYONE who possibly can do a teeny bit of bad. And also be absolute perfect in what s/he says and what s/he does! The process of being a president is kinda hard!