“I didn’t claim that I created the movie ‘Gattaca.’ See, that’s what’s absurd about this. The plot line from ‘Gattaca’ belongs to one person, the guy, the screenwriter, and I gave him credit for that,” Paul said. Paul said “a lot of people” work on his speeches so he can’t pinpoint one person responsible for the writing, and he dismissed the attacks as coming from “haters.”

Sen. Rand Paul got caught lifting bits of his speeches directly from Wikipedia articles about the things he was referencing. Not the biggest thing in the world, but he is determined to not understand what the problem might be Paul is confused. Nobody is pretending Sen. Rand Paul claimed that he wrote the movie Gattaca; people are pointing out that Sen. Rand Paul's speech referencing the plot of Gattaca just happens to be a near word-for-word lift of the Wikipedia article about Gattaca, and further pointing out that that's not very ethically nice, and is definitely gawd-awful lazy. (As we can see here, the next step will be to blame it on an intern.)

I'll be honest here: I don't care. Didn't respect Rand Paul before, not possible to respect him less now. It did, however, remind me of Paul's recent recollections of his med school years:



He went on to describe studying for a pathology test with friends in the library. "We spread the rumor that we knew what was on the test and it was definitely going to be all about the liver," he said. "We tried to trick all of our competing students into over-studying for the liver" and not studying much else. "So, that's my advice," he concluded. "Misinformation works."

So Sen. Paul spent his years in higher education trying to screw other students and even now has never really grasped the problem with plagiarizing other people's work. The guy must have been a real hit with his professors.

I'll give him this, though: He's really got the Randian mindset down, the mooching little parasite.