Ed Whelan:
Surprise, surprise. Another desperate 11th-hour smear, something that appears to have become a rite of passage for Republican Supreme Court nominees.
Someone (David Brock, call your office?) is shopping around to news outlets baseless claims that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch committed acts of plagiarism in four passages in his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Multiple academics who have reviewed the charges—including one of Gorsuch’s imagined victims—have rejected those claims, which, they explain, rest on a misunderstanding of academic citation standards and don’t involve misappropriation of anyone’s ideas, theories, or creative expressions.
In what is supposedly the starkest example, the plagiarism peddler contends that Gorsuch wrongly borrowed from a 1984 law-review article when he described Down syndrome as a “chromosomal disorder that involves both a certain amount of physical deformity and some degree of mental retardation.” The article describes it as “an incurable chromosomal disorder that involves a certain amount of physical deformity and an unpredictable degree of mental retardation.” The peddler also contends that Gorsuch plagiarized when he wrote, “Esophageal atresia with tracheoesophageal fistula means that the esophageal passage from the mouth to the stomach ends in a pouch, with an abnormal connection between the trachea and the esophagus.” The article states: “Esophageal atresia with tracheoesophageal fistula indicates that the esophageal passage from the mouth to the stomach ends in a pouch, with an abnormal connection between the trachea and the esophagus.” Gorsuch cites the same underlying sources that the article does.
Abigail Lawlis Kuzma, the author of the law-review article, repudiates the plagiarism charges:
Just like with Clarence Thomas and the notorious Anita Hill these dirty demacrats will try anything in their little black books to try and stop Gorsuch from being confermed more reasons there’s dirty politics in Washington D.C.
@Spurwing Plover: Let’s not forget Robert Bork, from which the infamous term “Borked” came into being, and is standard modus operandi for the Democrats…
Mark Manson titled a recent book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. great book and most demorats should read it. one has to realize that most demorats and followers are simply just jerking off their egos. entitlement is ramped and it is the opinion that blacks are now entitled to kill whites. Good review on this subject in the American Thinker within the last two days.