There are, scientifically speaking, about a bajillion functioning, competent adults in America today. It's not clear why Donald Trump's entire assembled team can't find even one.
Monica Crowley, President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for a top National Security Council job, plagiarized numerous passages in her Ph.D. dissertation, Politico Magazine has found.
Oh, goodie. This would be the same Monica Crowley—nominated for a National Security Council job because Trump saw her on television shouting about vague security stuff and that is all that is required, in Trump-world, to be considered an Expert In The Field—just discovered to have plagiarized repeatedly throughout her 2012 book. She was discovered to have plagiarized in a Wall Street Journal column she wrote in 1999. Now similar theft has been found in her 2000 dissertation, and we can presume the only reason plagiarism hasn't yet been found in other of her works is because up until a month or so ago nobody on the planet gave a damn what Monica Crowley wrote or did so nobody was looking.
What's maddening is that plagiarism is among the stupidest ethical dodges a person can make in the internet age. Jeebus, it's not like it's hard to footnote things in a dissertation. A misprint here and there could conceivably happen, but being caught plagiarizing throughout? It's pure intellectual laziness, or scammery, and I will never understand why just so many conservative "deep thinkers" get caught doing this. Perhaps their standards for “deep thinker” are just that low.
By checking passages in the document against the sources Crowley cites, focusing on paragraphs that come before and after footnotes of key sources in her bibliography, we found numerous structural and syntactic similarities. She lifted passages from her footnoted texts, occasionally making slight wording changes but rarely using quotation marks. Sometimes she didn’t footnote at all.
Further sales of her 2012 book are now being halted by HarperCollins so that the required revisions can be made. Will any of this affect her reputation as—sigh—a national security wonk? No, that would require someone, anyone on Trump's team to give a damn.
But maybe instead of putting Crowley on the National Security team we should be putting the people she plagiarized from on that team. They're the deep thinkers, after all—the ones with the ideas conservatives really, really like.