WELL, JOE BIDEN AND JUAN WILLIAMS HAVE GONE ON TO PROSPER, BUT THEY’RE DEMOCRATS. Matt Welch: Rand Paul’s Plagiarism, and the Weird Man’s Burden. “If your goal is to genuinely compete in a general election with your once-marginalized ideas, instead of building a revolutionary movement at the margins, then you don’t need to be as clean as the competition–you need to be cleaner.”

My thoughts on plagiarism in politics — including a defense of Joe Biden — can be found here, excerpted from the book Peter Morgan and I wrote, The Appearance of Impropriety: How The Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business and Society. I have to say, nothing has happened since it came out in 1997 to suggest that its thesis is obsolete. . . .