Used
The Huff Post's Sam Stein had this nice catch today: Apparently, John McCain's "major" economic speech this week included a recycled graph from an October 2001 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
This week's speech included:
"The lives of a nation's finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die," McCain told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. "Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us... we cannot wish the war to be a better place."
October 2001 piece:
"War is a miserable business," the Arizona Senator wrote in a Wall Street Journal oped in October 2001. "The lives of a nation's finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted, economies are damaged. Strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that will be lost when war claims its wages from us. Shed a tear, and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must. There is no avoiding the war we are in today, any more than we could have avoided world war after our fleet was bombed at Pearl Harbor.... War is a miserable business. Let's get on with it."
We're all for recycling, but c'mon!
Will Clinton call it plagiarism?
I think the greater irony is that McCain uses the same language to a) signal a desire for a less militaristic foreign policy and b) justify voting for the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country.
McSame is same OLD. Whether it is wanting more war, pro-rich anti-middleclass policies McCain is worst than Bush. He is definitely Bush on Steroids!
This is the problem with 7/24 internet and cable coverage of the election. People with space to fill make big deals out of nothing. So McCain uses the same words - his attitude toward war is consistent. And this is from a Clinton supporter.
I am starting to lean toward not reading anything on the internet anymore; I have already stopped watching the cable networks, because much of what is posted and broadcast is stupid. Whatever happened to real jouranlism?
kathy, sounds like you're still stinging from that little Bosnia lie....
[Blink] "nice catch"? "c'mon"?
Over recycling?
All campaigns include recycling. That's what a "stump speech" is all about: the same speech given over and over and over, essentially quoting the candidate's own words, if you will.
"C'mon" yourself. This is picking at the finest of nits. Is it so difficult to think that the man settled on a phrase early on which accurately depicts his state of mind, and uses it when he believes the phrase best fits?
This is not plagiarism, which is the unattributed using of the words of another. Should a recycler give an attribution as innoculation? "As I myself have said on several occaisions, including 2001 in the Wall Street Journal, . . ."? Would that be enough?
I don't mind the report, since it's interesting information which suggests something different to me (that he thought it out before and hasn't changed his mind). You could have enough pointed it out as a coda to the thought discussed above (the tendency of candidates to repeat). It's the implication of wrong-doing which seems journalistically odd here.