Well, this is interesting:
That’s sloppy, Joe.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden reprised his penchant for borrowing lines from other people’s work this week — apparently relying a bit too heavily on the words of a deceased Canuck party leader during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, reports said.
Biden concluded his Thursday night speech by saying: “For love is more powerful than hate. Hope is more powerful than fear. Light is more powerful than dark.”
But Canadian media quickly noted that the former veep’s words were uncannily similar to those of Jack Layton, the leader of Canada’s left-wing New Democratic Party, who issued a poignant open letter to his fellow citizens as he lay dying in 2011.
“My friends,” Layton wrote, “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair.”
Biden’s word play — delivered two days before the nine-year anniversary of Layton’s death — gave some in the Great White North a serious case of déjà vu.
Go here to read the rest. It is quite true that Biden has been a plagiarist in the past, but I doubt if he is currently. In his present mental state I doubt if he wrote a word of what he read by rote and by teleprompter last Thursday. I will go further than that. If questioned as to what he meant by some of the passages in “his” speech he would be quickly flummoxed and falling back on “Come on man!”.
The Defendant is found not guilty on the charge of plagiarism and released to the care of his spouse Doctor Jill Biden.
“For love is more powerful than hate. Hope is more powerful than fear. Light is more powerful than dark.” Good statement Joe, regardless of where it came from.
My insight from this: Politics is religion in the real world.
Another analogy:
Layton’s family tried to avoid revealing his cause of death. I think it eventually leaked out that he’d he’d died of a metastases of a cancer for which he’d been treated previously and that he was campaigning for office while concealing that. The problem with that was that his last campaign was one of the few in the last 60 years where the New Democratic Party had a serious prospect of winning enough seats to put them in charge of the ministry.
NB, Biden didn’t just appropriate another person’s mode of expression or another person’s ideas. In public discourse, ideas and idioms are seldom original. He appropriating Kinnock’s family history. (He later substituted an alternative history which was also false). You have to be quite pathological to do something like that. (Biden is actually the scion of a family of salesmen).
You have to be quite pathological to do something like that.
Agreed. Also quite stupid because family backgrounds are so easy to check on.