Melania Trump Is Plagiarizing Michelle Obama, Chris Christie Is Plagiarizing 73% of the Undergrads Caught Plagiarizing

If you’ve taught at the college level, this will be very familiar:

But time spent fetching McDonalds for the Trump campaign does something to a man. This morning, Matt Lauer asked him of Melania Trump’s clearly plagiarized speech, “You’re a former prosecutor, could you make the case for plagiarism?”

Here is what he said: “Nah. Not when 93 percent of the speech is completely different than Michelle Obama’s speech.”

I concede the point: except for the parts that were plagiarized, the speech was not plagiarized! [UPDATE: I saw Paul beat me to this below.]

But, hey, keep in mind that if there was anything to like about Christie you’d have to have some sympathy for him:

“Black Thursday,” one of Gov. Chris Christie’s least favorite local newspaper columnists called it, under a headline that declared it his “worst day ever.” At the least, it was the New Jersey governor’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

On Thursday morning, one of his closest confidants pleaded guilty to a felony charge of abusing power at the agency that Mr. Christie tapped him to lead. By that afternoon, federal prosecutors had charged a former cabinet official in connection with the same case, which spun out of the George Washington Bridge lane-closing scandal that has dogged Mr. Christie for nearly three years.

Then he did not get the job he had been publicly pining for, and on which he had pinned his hopes of political resuscitation. Donald J. Trump, who is expected to become the Republican nominee for president next week, picked someone else as his running mate, despite an endorsement that dragged Mr. Christie’s poll numbers to record lows at home and alienated him from moderate Republicans he once called friends.

But, hey, he can hold out hope that another few months of being Donald Trump’s abject lickspittle might allow him to become the John Mitchell of Trump’s probably-not-going-to-happen administration!

…Ben Carson is more original:

Trump campaign surrogate Ben Carson on Tuesday dismissed evidence that elements of Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention were plagiarized from Michelle Obama, suggesting that if plagiarism did occur, it was a sign of shared values.

“If Melania’s speech is similar to Michelle Obama’s speech, that should make us all very happy because we should be saying, whether we’re Democrats or Republicans, we share the same values,” he told reporters after addressing a Florida GOP delegation breakfast at a hotel here 20 minutes outside of Cleveland, where the RNC is taking place.

“If we happen to share values, we should celebrate that, not try to make it into a controversy,” he added.

…The chances that these plagiarized passages shared values represented original thought on the part of Melania Trump’s speechwriters are less than one in a trillion.