Did Soros Pick the Plagiarist?

The announcements from the left-wing Media Matters group get funnier all the time. The organization is complaining that some news outlets have accurately reported that Senator Joseph Biden, picked as Barack Obama's running mate, was drummed out of the 1988 presidential race for plagiarism. Media Matters' criticism of this truthful account is that Biden on some other occasions had given credit to the person he stole the words from¯a British politician named Neil Kinnock. 

"Media outlets reported allegations Biden plagiarized Kinnock, but not that he had previously credited him," says the Media Matters headline. This is like saying that a convicted shoplifter paid for some items before and after he was caught stealing.

Why on earth was Biden using somebody else's words, in the context of describing his own upbringing, in the first place?

It wasn't just a matter of using a few words. You can see a striking comparison of the Biden and Kinnock speeches here. Ironically, this website, devoted to the proper techniques of college writing, says that plagiarism "can destroy a career." It hasn't destroyed Biden's. 

Rather than take the ridiculously absurd Media Matters line, New York Times reporters Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny reported that Biden "quit the 1988 presidential race in the face of accusations that he had plagiarized part of a speech from Neil Kinnock, the British Labor Party leader at the time" and that "Shortly afterward, he was found to have suffered two aneurysms."

Are they trying to imply that his brain problems accounted for the plagiarism? That doesn't make any sense because it was also discovered that Biden had been found guilty of plagiarism in law school. But the Times didn't mention that. It also came out that Biden had lifted material from a Bobby Kennedy speech.

As children are sent off to school and parents and teachers tell them that they are not supposed to cheat in their studies, this is not an unimportant matter. How do you explain to your children that they should be honest in their studies when somebody guilty of plagiarism is a sitting member of the Senate and is running for vice-president? What does this say about the character and integrity of the presidential nominee who picked him? Obama must have figured that since the major media have failed to seriously examine his background, they would be prepared to overlook or at least minimize Biden's history of plagiarism. It was a good bet.

This flawed nominee not only has a history of plagiarism but a record of making noxious comments, such as off-color remarks about people of color and congratulating Obama himself for being physically "bright and clean." No Republican senator could have survived such a scandalous record of outrageous utterances.

A friend had a brief discussion with Biden during a book signing in the spring at Rehoboth, Delaware. Biden was autographing copies of Promises to Keep, which examines his life and Senate career, including the plagiarism incidents. This individual was greatly concerned about the role of George Soros in financing the drug legalization movement but knew that Biden had been generally supportive of the war on drugs. She asked for Biden's help in exposing Soros's influence in the political process. He replied, "I've been spending a lot of time with Soros lately." That ended the discussion.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to detect the hidden hand of George Soros in Obama's Biden pick.

The media pundits say that Biden has good foreign policy credentials. But that assumes that Biden has ideas of his own and is not "borrowing" them from somewhere else. Soros is probably the source of many of them. He has financially supported Obama, Biden and other Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee.

What the public has to understand¯and the media are not making clear¯is that Biden may be the strongest supporter of the United Nations in the entire Congress today. He even supports an International Criminal Court. Plus, he helped ram Obama's pro-U.N. Global Poverty Act and the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Treaty through his Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The former was accomplished with no hearings and the latter with stacked hearings.

Years ago, Biden wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal (assuming that he actually wrote the article) under the headline, "How I Learned to Love the New World Order." This can only be understood by taking into account a pamphlet entitled, "NATO and the New World Order,"  written by billionaire George Soros, a major funder of Democratic Party politicians, including Biden, and the left-wing of the party. The Soros plan, which is identical to Biden's, is to make NATO, once an anti-Communist alliance, into a military arm of the U.N.  

As I have previously reported, back in 1993, during hearings conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden outlined the aggressive role that NATO was to play in Yugoslavia six years later under the Clinton Administration. Biden said that "organizing for collective security" meant "strengthening the U.N. by assigning to the Security Council certain pre-designated military forces and facilities" and "converting NATO into a military instrument for peacekeeping, and peacemaking, under U.N. or CSCE [Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe] auspices."

The future of NATO, which was transformed into an offensive military alliance by President Clinton without the benefit of a treaty, should be a big issue of this campaign. Expanding NATO has meant committing the U.S. Armed Forces to the defense of countless more countries around the globe, even though NATO doesn't have the strength, will or resources to defend them.

If NATO transformation and expansion had been undertaken in strict consultation with Congress and a new treaty submitted and ratified, that would be one thing. Instead, Clinton accomplished this mostly through executive action. Some conservative senators protested at the time, but eventually acceded to presidential power and started voting for new NATO members.

Senator John McCain seems to share the Soros-Biden "vision" of what NATO should be. He, like Obama, has called for the U.S. to be actively involved in growing international alliances, whether NATO or a proposed League of Democracies, that could get our Armed Forces involved in a series of conflicts and civil wars around the world that have absolutely nothing to do with U.S. national interests. Since NATO has proven to be incapable of seriously fighting terrorism in Afghanistan or even condemning Russia for its invasion of Georgia , the value of this 26-nation alliance, said to represent 900 million people, has to be questioned.  

Even if Georgia had already joined NATO, does anybody seriously think NATO would have gone to war against Russia ? The organization has become a paper tiger and substitute for the U.S. defending its own national security interests. It is a bipartisan disaster that has held out false hope to the freed peoples of the old Soviet republics. 

In this context, it is significant that the McCain campaign has produced a TV ad that shows Biden saying on the Daily Show that "I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off."

Highlighting such a comment may make Biden look foolish, as he continues attacking McCain during the campaign. But it will also highlight the fact that there's really not a dime's worth of difference between them on some critical foreign policy issues. It also makes McCain look foolish, since he comes across as grateful for the kind words of a disgraced foreign policy "thinker."