Ryan Grim Discusses GOP Candidate's Alleged Plagiarism Of Obama Speech On MSNBC (VIDEO)

Huffington Post political reporter Ryan Grim appeared on MSNBC today, with Tamron Hall, to discuss Republican congressional candidate Vaughn Ward's alleged plagiarism of a Barack Obama speech. Ward, who is running in today's Republican primary for Idaho's first congressional district against Tea Party-backed State Representative Raul Labrador, is accused of plagiarizing a speech that then-State Senator Barack Obama gave at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Ryan Grim noted that Ward didn't steal any of Obama's ideas, just his rhetoric. "It kind of makes me wonder, why do we demand that our politicians string together their cliches in an original way? Maybe the fact is that we're just running out of cliches," said Grim. "What if we start updating our store of cliches to fit contemporary society a little bit better? Like, instead of saying 'we're at a crossroads,' we could say, 'my fellow Americans, we've come to a bus stop.'"

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Comments

[jimhaymans]

07:06 PM on 06/07/2010

From my point of Vaughn Ward as a young ambitious politician decided to use the strategy in speeches, which proved to work already. Why did he do it? That's a difficult question. I doubt that he lacks education to develop his own impressive and influential speeches. I think it's the fear, that made him just copy something, which proved to work before. he was just afraid to be innovative and got for his own words. Of course you can be critical and blame him. I am not into politics that much, but I've looked through his official web page, seems like a reliable program to me... But nevertheless it's an outrageous case of course. P.S. I have googled up some more of his speeches at this file search http://rapidok.com Some of them are quite comprehensive.

[gkclapp]

08:59 PM on 05/25/2010

I worked with a jerk like him. Thought he could get ahead of others by literally ripping off other people's ideas (plus he left his own wife for his wife's best friend who thay let live with them when she was kicked out of her house during a divorce.) These cheaters always get caught, sooner or later. You would think he would have at the very least stolen his speech from a conservative, Not President Obama.

[mrmikes]

04:44 PM on 05/25/2010

If you watched the split screen, there is no doubt of plagarism, right down to the pauses.

[LameDuckHunting]

01:52 PM on 05/25/2010

He should have started with "Four score and seven years ago......." No one would have caught it.....

[we-r-stardust]

02:47 PM on 05/25/2010

"Rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg " Works for me...

[MikeDu]

01:39 PM on 05/25/2010

The Republican party. Undisputed grand master of 'unintended irony'.