That’s sly, Joe.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden reprized his preference for borrowing lines from other people’s work this week – apparently relying a little too heavily on the words of a deceased Canuck party leader during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, reports said .
Biden ended his Thursday night speech by saying, ‘For love is more powerful than hate. Hope is more powerful than fear. Light is more powerful than darkness. ”
But Canadian media soon found that the words of the former veep were unanimously similar to those of Jack Layton, the leader of the Canadian left-wing New Democratic Party, who gave an appealing open letter to his colleagues when he was nine. died of cancer years ago, on August 22, 2011.
‘My friends,’ wrote Layton, ‘love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. ”
“A number of Canadians are affected by the similarities between Biden’s speech and the final words of Jack Layton’s farewell letter before his death,” said CBC Washington correspondent Alexander Panetta tweeted at the time.
Layton’s report had meanwhile used similar language attributed to former Canadian Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier, the National Post reported.
“Let me tell you that for the solution of these problems you have a safe guide, an unsafe light when you remember that faith is better than doubt and love is better than hate,” Laurier said in 1916.
The differences between Biden’s language and Layton – and Laurier for that matter – were apparently subtle enough to escape the $ 4,200 anti-plagiarism software program that installed the Democratic nomination campaign last year.
Biden’s cribbing habit goes back decades.
In 1987, he resigned in the wake of the Democratic Party’s presidential race, after ripping off the lines of Labor Party chairman Neil Kinnock in a debate – and even going so far as to say elements of to claim Kinnock’s family history as his own.
As a law school student in 1965, Biden flanked a class for repeating published works without attribution.
And as recently as last year, Biden caught heat for stealing rules from groups for climate activists and used them, word for word, in his own plan for climate change – signing President Trump’s exemption.
“Plagiarism issue against Sleepy Joe Biden on his ridiculous Climate Change Plan is a big issue, but the corrupt media will save him,” Trump tweeted at the time.
Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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