I’ve been more or less on Rand Paul’s side in the whole Wikipedia plagiarism scandal. From a legal standpoint, there is nothing because Wikipedia is not copyrighted. And from an ethical standpoint, it just isn’t that big a deal. The obvious (And correct!) reaction would have been for Paul to admit that one of his speech writers screwed up. But now he is claiming that he did not plagiarize and that this is all about footnotes. No! You lifted exact sentences from Wikipedia and pretended they were your own work. That’s not that big a deal, but pretending that you didn’t do that very much is.

One of the great things about this is that Rand Paul is supposed to be this good old fashioned politician who really believes in things. Well, I never bought that load of crap. But one thing I am constantly impressed with is just how slippery Paul is. He is one of the very best at avoiding questions and, as in this case, finessing questions so that they sound like something wholly other than what they clearly are. He is the most corrupt of politicians and he is every bit as dangerous as Ted Cruz.

Here is The Rachel Maddow Show on the latest:

Update (1 November 2013 9:58 pm)

Now it appears that Rand Paul plagiarized copyrighted material from the Associated Press. If he had just admitted to error in the first place, none of these new bits of plagiarism would have been uncovered. What it looks like to me is that Paul has an extremely lazy staff who aren’t good at their jobs. But then we’ve long know that he doesn’t have the highest standards.