The big exclusive from Think Progress:
Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) gave a foreign policy speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council....
These lines are not McCain's own. As TP reader 5th Estate discovered, they were in fact taken largely from a 1996 speech by ret. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer. Below is a comparison of McCain's address yesterday with Ziemer's in 1996.
We were never that impressed with the flap over Obama's plagiarizing of a Deval Patrick speech. Stealing great lines is what politicians do. My only observation at the time was that Patrick delivered the lines better (click through to see the video for yourself). But this time, it turns out that Ziemer had ripped off a 1995 McCain speech! Ambinder gets the scoop in an email from Mark Salter, who delivers a link to the original speech delivered by McCain to the VFW.
Think Progress has since updated their post explaining they "regret the error." Errors do tend to happen when your source can only be identified as "5th Estate." Over at the Huffington Post, which gave top billing to the phony story before disappearing it off the front page, the article remains uncorrected. But we have to give Arianna credit, she did correct her piece from earlier this week in which she accused McCain of not knowing the difference between Sunni and Shia before mixing up Syria and Iran herself. I'm sure she'll get around to posting an update to this story as well.
Update: A reader objects to the title of this post: "Think Progress did not just 'get sloppy.' They're sloppy in everything they do and routinely get stuff wrong. This just happens to be a very high-profile mistake. But it's of a piece with their hackwork, not a departure from it."
