Former vice president Joe Biden has a reputation for being able to find a gaffe almost anywhere. Like when he repeatedly referred to British prime minister Theresa May as "Margaret Thatcher," or waiting until the last possible moment to apologize to Anita Hill and then still not actually apologizing. Indeed, it's a real talent to stumble when unveiling standard-issue policy proposals. But Biden still managed to do it.

As it turns out, portions of those policies were lifted, without attribution, from private special-interest groups, according to a new report from The Washington Post. The quotes themselves are relatively bland, but it's where they were lifted from that's particularly telling. Per the Post:

[Josh Nelson of the progressive group CREDO] found the phrases were a near-identical match with wording used by the Carbon Capture Coalition, whose members include Shell, Peabody Energy, and Arch Coal. Biden’s climate plan calls for making carbon capture, use, and storage a “widely available, cost-effective, and rapidly scalable solution to reduce carbon emissions to meet mid-century climate goals.”

The Post called the incidents "staff errors," adding that they "underscored how hastily his campaign was attempting to put out specific proposals." (Some candidates, of course, like Elizabeth Warren, have been putting out policies quickly and consistently without those problems, but that's neither here nor there.) But that means that Biden's staff, in an effort to flesh out the candidate's climate policy position, pulled ideas from a group of fossil-fuel companies. For education policy, they went to the XQ Institute, a billionaire-backed organization intended to, in Silicon Valley jargon, "disrupt" public high schools.

It's a bad look for Biden especially. His first presidential campaign in 1988 sank after it leaked that he gave multiple speeches lifting language from politicians like Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey without attributing it to them—and even before that, he admitted to plagiarism in law school, saying he didn't know how to use citations. Still, those are better sources than a coalition of coal and natural-gas companies. "I've done some dumb things, and I'll do dumb things again," he said at the time, less than a week before quitting the race. He got that one right all on his own.