Rand Paul On Plagiarism Claims: ‘It Annoys The Hell Out Of Me’ (Washington Post)

Although I haven’t even been out of high school for twenty years (but I’m still having lots of nightmares about my high school experiences to this day), the advances in research technology made in just that short span of time mean that my experience as a high school student is worlds removed from what my students went through in high school. CD-ROM technology was just becoming common in schools when I finished high school, and most card catalogues were still made of, well, cards. I often reminisce with my students about the smell all those old cards made, housed in those wooden drawers for years and years. It was even better at public libraries, where patrons used to be able to smoke back in the day, so sometime you’d get a hint of pipe tobacco when you opened up a drawer in the card catalogues and took a great big sniff. For all the advances in education technology, students’ senses, especially their olfactory ones, aren’t getting stimulated like they used to, and I can’t help wondering if that might be part of the reason student dissatisfaction with school continues to grow.

Plagiarism was a concern back when I was in high school, of course. I never poked around my father’s CompuServe account that much (the Internet was just starting to take off among the American public my senior year), but I’m guessing that there were people on there who were willing to write students’ papers for them for a few dollars. These days, of course, banks of pre-written papers are legion online, and I point out to my students that we English teachers maintain our own searchable databases of these papers that I can check their papers against, just to further discourage them from attempting plagiarism. (I run a very loose ship in my classes, but I make it clear from day one that I have zero tolerance for plagiarism. I, and the other students in the class, put too much work into the class to make plagiarism even the slightest bit palatable.) Still, on multiple occasions I have been able to catch plagiarism simply by running a sentence from a student’s paper through Google, and that always make me want to smack my head in frustration. If you’re going to plagiarize, the least you can do is put some effort into cheating.

Academia’s dislike of Wikipedia masks some intriguing and relevant questions about the nature of how “reality” and “truth” are formed, to say nothing of studies showing Wikipedia’s reliability compared to other, more traditional sources of knowledge. Still, lifting a paper word-for-word off of a Wikipedia article is widely considered the academic equivalent of going into your instructor’s office, dropping trou, leaving a huge defecation in the middle of their chair, then expecting to pass the course based on the quality of your excrement. Still, even students who get caught red-handed committing an act of plagiarism usually have the sense to fess up to what they did, if only in the hope of lessening the punishment they know is to follow.

I make no secret of the fact that I strongly dislike Rand Paul. Even though his libertarianism and mine puts us in agreement on a number of issues, his career as a public servant, from his asscheek-clenching evasion of questions about civil rights legislation, to his attempts to attach personhood amendments to so many bills that have passed through the Senate, has put him firmly in that part of the modern conservative movement where I wouldn’t trust him with a pair of scissors, let alone public office. When the news of Rand Paul’s first act of plagiarism broke, I have to admit that I had a moment of pure sadistic glee. As a college English instructor, I’m expected to give zero points to any papers that plagiarize, especially when that plagiarism is sloppy and comes from Wikipedia. I suspect that even high school English classes today have a similar standard. Surely we must hold our Senators to a higher standard than that of a high school or community college English class, right?

Making matters worse for Paul was that his first response was a total whiff, saying that what he did couldn’t count as plagiarism because he was just summarizing a couple of movies. (By the time he responded to the initial plagiarism report, a second instance had already surfaced, and more have come out since then.) It’s bad enough that Paul plagiarized in the first place, but he then displayed that he didn’t even know what plagiarism is, when he tried to claim that the summaries couldn’t have been acts of plagiarism, even though they were copied nearly word-for-word — too much to possibly be coincidental — from Wikipedia. By this point, any sane country would have laughed Paul out of public office, and I mean literally laugh him out, following him around and laughing at his lack of high school-level understanding of giving credit to outside sources for their work, until he fled from Washington in embarrassment.

(Yes, these things were likely written by Paul’s staffers and not Paul himself, but the buck stops with Paul because he was the one who hired them in the first place. Let’s keep in mind that this is the same Senator who thought hiring a secessionist racist in a Confederate flag luchador mask to his staff was a wise decision. The only person in politics who has any business hiring people in luchador masks is Linda McMahon, and Linda McMahon has no business in politics. How can anyone who makes these kinds of personnel decisions be considered Senate-worthy?)

Paul’s second response, although just as inappropriate for a Senator, was no laughing matter. The rise in mass shootings in recent years, coupled with all the talk of armed insurrection since President Obama took office, should have put the nail in the coffin of politicians, and other public figures, using gun metaphors. Paul challenging the “hacks” and “haters” who brought up these plagiarism charges (notably his longtime nemesis Rachel Maddow) to a duel was not only highly inappropriate, but it was totally beside the point. Threatening, or worse yet performing, physical violence on your political opponents does not make your opinion any more valid or correct. It provides some real red meat to the neanderthals in your base, granted, but it’s exactly the kind of behaviour we don’t need others to think is okay. One of my main concerns about Paul’s plagiarism (and the increasing likelihood that he won’t really be held accountable for it) is the example it sets for my students, present and future. If a United States Senator can just lift whole sections of Wikipedia word-for-word and face no repercussions for doing so, why should my students think that they shouldn’t be able to do the same? Similarly, if Rand Paul can threaten to shoot public figures he disagrees with, and no one calls him out on it, what’s to stop his followers from doing the same thing when they encounter “haters” and “hacks” like Rachel Maddow, or just someone with a yard sign for a Democratic candidate in their front yard?

We’re now entering the third act of this sad saga, with half-admissions to wrongdoing on Paul’s part, but even those are blotted out by Paul doing the one thing any conservative figure can do to piss me off in an instant: He’s playing the victim card. It would be bad enough if Paul was just whining about all the work he has to do as a Senator — as if being a member of one of the most powerful wings of our national government should be a walk in the park when it comes to workload — but like so many Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks and John Kasichs before him, he has conflated criticism of his public performance with personal attacks, insisting that any criticism of him, or his views, or how he expresses those views, are emblematic of a widespread left-wing conspiracy that isn’t going after conservative ideology, or even just expressions of that ideology, but impugning his pure-as-the-driven-snow reputation. This is just another example of the sickening ways public discourse changed with the marriage of the Religious Right to the Reagan Revolution, this insistence on showering conservative figures like Reagan and Limbaugh and Beck and Rand Paul with Christ-like qualities of infallibility. Not only is this notion absurd, but it effectually cuts off the mere possibility of public discourse with a large chunk of America that has been trained to revere these figures (literally) religiously, so that even the mere suggestion that any of them might be wrong about any issue gets you branded as an idiot at best, a heretic and traitor at worst.

From the moment Rand Paul won his Senate seat in Kentucky, he’s appeared to have done far more work to build his national reputation than he has to actually, you know, be a Senator. I don’t like talking about presidential elections three years in advance, but when elected officials do so much to make it clear that they want to run in the next Presidential election (Chris Christie’s victory speech Tuesday night was so obviously a kickoff to his campaign that he might as well have handed out “Christie 2016” signs to his audience), and do so at the expense of the work they were elected to perform, is it any wonder our whole system of governance is so dysfunctional? This is a troubling problem among many Republicans and Democrats: Public office is no longer seen as the zenith of a career, but a mere stepping stone to the real peak, being a pundit on one of the cable news networks (and holding a fellowship at a partisan think tank, or a cushy lobbying job, for a nice little six-figure guaranteed salary to boot).

Our elected officials should be held to at least some standard of accountability, and if Rand Paul is going to dodge and whine his way to a point where all these acts of plagiarism cost him less than it would a college student — possibly even a high school student — who did the same thing, is it any wonder that we’re left with a government that can’t do more than name a post office without coming close to some kind of national or world catastrophe?