Allen West, a member of the Tea Party, a former member of the US House (R-FL), and a retired Army lieutenant colonel, can add another job description to his resume: plagiarizer.
According to Media Matters, West “heavily plagiarized” from a story that recently went viral in a piece on his website that criticized President Obama and his administration for “purportedly ignoring the deaths of law enforcement officers.”
West wrote the piece yesterday in response to the recent protests over the multiple deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, specifically the rallying cry of “black lives matter.” In it, he wondered if Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder ever “considered if the lives of law enforcement officers matter,” and said he had done “a little checking and scouring for some information. And it didn’t take long to find proof of hypocrisy that reaches the highest levels — the Oval Office.”
Then, in a move that can only be described as delicious irony, West proceeded to lift six passages — typos and all — from the viral piece that had previously been posted on sites like Yahoo! Answers, Free Republic, Facebook, and even on West’s own Facebook fanpage.
Here is a side by side comparison of the original post and West’s. (Larger version available here.)
West ended his piece by saying, “I write this missive because I despise hypocrisy,” which is also laughably ironic as West was one of the loudest voices rallying against Minnesota Senator John Walsh (D), who was found to have plagiarized his master’s thesis for the US Army War College.
“I’m always entertained by the hypocrisy of the progressive socialist left,” wrote West in a piece about Walsh on his website.
It’s probably safe to say that West isn’t as entertained now that his own plagiarism has been exposed, but anytime a member of the Tea Party gets outed as a fraud, we’re delighted.
