On Saturday, CNN issued a report on a master’s thesis that was written by Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke in 2013. CNN’s report was titled: “Sheriff David Clarke plagiarized portions of his master’s thesis on homeland security.”
Only, if you read the article, it turns out that Sheriff Clarke didn’t do much, if anything, wrong. CNN’s strongest claim was that Clarke footnoted some paragraphs with citations to his original sources, but quoted portions of what those sources wrote without using quotation marks. So he properly credited his sources, but didn’t clearly distinguish between his own paraphrases and the original authors’ words. Is that optimal academic practice? No. Does it manifest an intent to take credit for someone else’s ideas? No.
Why did CNN go to such lengths to smear Sheriff Clarke? Because he is a black conservative who has been appointed to a position in President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.
The Royall Asses [I should note that the writers of the web site are not themselves the “Asses.” Rather, they exposed the “Royall Asses” who were behind the fake hate crime referred to below. So henceforth I will refer to them as the “Royall Ass Exposers.”], a group of (relatively) conservative students at Harvard Law School, smelled a rat. Why? Because two of the law school’s most prominent professors–Laurence Tribe, the leading Democrat on the faculty, and Charles Ogletree, acclaimed as Barack Obama’s mentor–have long been embroiled in a far worse plagiarism scandal. As you might recall, last spring the Royall Ass Exposers played a key role in unmasking a “hate crime” hoax perpetrated by leftists at Harvard Law School. We covered the story extensively here and in several other posts.
The Ass Exposers write about CNN’s hit piece on Sheriff Clarke:
Anyone looking up each source cited would realize that Sheriff Clarke was giving full credit to the author(s) who had originally made the point. And thus no claim can colorably be made here that Sheriff Clarke did anything dishonorable which might remotely bear on his role in public life.
So why did CNN take the time to locate, review, and research Sheriff Clarke’s master’s thesis? Because CNN is part of the liberal fake-news media apparatus that has been targeting President Trump since Day 1 of his presidency, and it is attempting to carry out a political hit job on a black conservative who is detested by liberals with a fury which exceeds (because he’s a black who refuses to stay on the plantation) even their hatred of President Trump.
Exactly right. What about the Tribe and Ogletree scandals?
[W]e’re students at Harvard Law School, familiar with the legendary crash and burn of two of its most famous professors, Laurence Tribe and Charles Ogletree, who were caught not just plagiarizing from the books of other scholars without even citing them (Clarke, by contrast, cited each scholar relied on), but were caught having students ghostwrite their books for them (no one disputes that Clarke, by contrast, wrote his master’s thesis himself).
CNN’s political agenda is made clear by the fact that it never devoted such intensive analysis to the plagiarism and use of ghostwriters by Ogletree and Tribe, not in 2004 when the scandals arose, not in 2008, when Ogletree and Tribe were in the news as key campaign aides to Obama (and lauded by the liberal media for having mentored Obama during law school), and not even in 2010 when Tribe was appointed to a high-level post in the Department of Justice.
The professors’ defense, as I understand it, was that they didn’t know about the plagiarism because they didn’t actually write the works that appeared under their names. You can follow the Royall Ass Exposers’ links to get the details.
The conclusion is blindingly obvious. We all know that if CNN didn’t have double standards, it wouldn’t have any standards at all:
Apparently, when supporters of a president are appointed to high-level positions or are otherwise influential, CNN is interested in plagiarism stories only if the president is conservative. CNN’s failure to cover the Ogletree and Tribe plagiarism/ghostwriting scandals is proof positive that its current story is a political hit job.
Well done, Royall Ass Exposers! I am pleased to learn that only one of the Exposers is graduating this year. The others will be around to bedevil Cambridge leftists for some time to come.
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