Who is smarter, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris?

My answer is Kamala Harris. Why? Because Joe Biden stole lines from Neil Kinnock, whereas Kamala Harris stole lines, it seems, from Martin Luther King. If you’re going to indulge in plagiarism, you might as well steal from a great storyteller, rather than a hack British pol.

Biden’s plagiarism is well known, although the mainstream media doesn’t like to remind people of it. Harris’ plagiarism problem has only just come to light:

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris apparently appropriated an anecdote first told by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. when she was interviewed by Elle Magazine for a feature that was published in October, at the height of the 2020 presidential election campaign.

Harris has repeatedly boasted of her parents’ involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the Elle interview, she recalled accompanying them to marches as a toddler in a stroller.

“Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young,” writer Ashley C. Ford led off the piece. “She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller … and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset.”

“My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris told the magazine. “And she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

Awww.

The problem is that Harris’ story bears a striking resemblance to one told by King in a 1965 interview published in Playboy. Said King:

I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a White policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother,” King said at the time. “‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’ She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me.

Evidently, it buoyed Harris too.

Is it possible that Harris did not lift her story from King — that she actually did utter the immortal word “fweedom” after tumbling from her stroller? I guess. But Harris is a serial liar.

For example, she lied about being in “only the second class to integrate in Berkeley Public Schools.” She lied when she claimed that the coronavirus pandemic “hit America worse than any other advanced nation.” She lied when she claimed that Joe Biden would not ban fracking.

So there is no reason to give Harris the benefit of the doubt and assume, implausibly, that it’s only a coincidence she told essentially the same cute little story King did, with herself in the role of baby heroine.

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