KV Campaign 2008

Lest one think that the old KV boys think nothing but punchball, LMRC baseball, and pranks they also look seriously at the 2008 election. One "researcher" was able to debunk a current infatuation with Joe Biden by digging into his checkered past:

"I seem to remember Joe Biden getting into trouble during a primary season for plagiarism, so I googled
Joe Biden & plagiarism and found the following:
Plagiarism can have catastrophic consequences for one's career as a student and even later on in life—and the higher one's ambition takes one, the higher the stakes. In 1987, for instance, Senator Joe Biden, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was accused of plagiarizing passages in speeches and interviews from the oratory of a British politician, Neil Kinnock. Here are some of the passages in question":

Kinnock (original)

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

Was it because our predecessors were thick? 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? . . . 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 . . .

It turned out Biden had also borrowed passages from old campaign speeches by Robert Kennedy and had inflated his academic record. But oratory has a long tradition of borrowing and even "heavy lifting," as speechwriters call it, so Biden stayed alive in the presidential race. The last straw, however, came when it turned out that twenty years earlier Biden had received a failing grade in a law school course for plagiarizing a legal article (he'd given a single footnote while lifting five full pages from the article). Biden said he'd been unaware of the appropriate standards for legal briefs, but the public was unimpressed. His campaign collapsed and he withdrew from the race.

....so instead we got Dukakis as the Presidential candidate in '88.

How