(Newser)
–
It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for Scott Brown: Last week, there was that unfortunate Elizabeth Warren comment; now, he's being accused of plagiarism. A liberal super PAC discovered that Brown’s website lifted a significant portion of an Elizabeth Dole speech from 2002, the Boston Globe reports. The remarks, which have since been removed, start, “I was raised to believe that there are no limits to individual achievement and no excuses to justify indifference,” and follow the rest of Dole’s comment verbatim.
They do leave out a fairly important opening line, however: “I am Mary and John Hanford’s daughter.” A Brown spokesperson says it was simply an oversight, and that the language was “inadvertently transferred” from Dole’s site, which staffers used as a model for Brown’s. Gawker points to the Dole passage, which is available on Google Books, and notes that the line immediately following the cited comments was also conveniently omitted: “I am Bob Dole’s wife." Complains the super PAC president, “The fact that he can’t come up with a personal values statement of his own, that he has to steal someone else’s, I think is very instructive of what kind of politician he is."
