It's Melania! Get the pitchforks!

Get Melania! Plagiarism charges thrown at Trump’s first lady in waiting  "By most accounts, Melania Trump’s speech to the GOP Convention was a success – until charges flew that she had plagiarized a speech given by Michelle Obama to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.  First noted on Twitter by Jarrett Hill, a small portion of Melania’s speech bore a strong resemblance to Michelle’s.  Here is a side-by-side comparison:

"If Melania plagiarized Michelle, then Michelle plagiarized others.  Compare Michelle’s words with the advice found in a 1992 book about doing business in Africa:" . . .

. . . 

Do the political swells so concerned with this “scandal” really think that anyone’s vote would be swayed by whether Melania voiced the same bromides as Michelle?

Update: Yeah, plagiarism is a very serious thing in speeches:



Then, there is the beloved by Democrats Joe Biden:

Who can forget Joe's campaign speech lifted from the UK's Neil Kinnock?

Trump Camp: Melania's Speech 'Included Fragments' of Michelle Obama Speech 'That Reflected Her Own Thinking'  Yeah, that should shut her critics up.

. . . "At a Bloomberg breakfast this morning, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said he'd "probably" fire the speechwriting team that crafted Melania's speech. “Certainly I don’t blame her for anything,” he said.

. . . 

"Before her address, Melania Trump told NBC News of the speech: “I read once over it and that’s all, because I wrote it, and with as little help as possible.' "

Bloomberg’s Heilemann: Melania Plagiarism Worse than Biden, Obama  "Is There Nothing a Liberal Does that the MSM Won’t Find Some Way to Defend?"

Trump Campaign Has No Plans to Fire Anyone Over Melania Speech Flap  "UPDATE: Now sources are telling NBC "heads will roll" over this. 
"It's piss-poor staff work," a source within the campaign told NBC News. "Melania has been humiliated. No doubt heads are going to roll." 

"This is a developing story, more to come."

Manafort on speech plagiarism: When Hillary Clinton is threatened by a woman she always tries to destroy her Did Hillary hire that speech writer?

Melania Speechwriter Rickrolls* GOP Convention

  "It’s funny, but there are a couple of serious issues that this reveals.

"First: whoever wrote that speech is a mole. The insertion of the Michelle Obama plagiarism was no mistake. The speechwriter is trying to embarrass the Trumps. And they don’t mind making it perfectly obvious.

. . . 

"It’s good to know that when they have an active mole inside their campaign, their reflexive desire to deny any and all wrongdoing will compel them to go into Baghdad Bob mode rather than seek out the mole."
* Rickroll: . . . " This is usually considered a major let-down."

Analysis: What Happened During Today's Ugly 'Never Trump' Convention Floor Fight

Townhall

"Upheaval and confusion reigned on the Republican National Convention floor this afternoon when the presiding chairman ruled that there would be no full roll call vote pertaining to the adoption of the confab's governing rules. Conservative opponents of Donald Trump said they'd secured signatures from the majorities of nine to eleven delegations, easily clearing the seven-delegation threshold required to trigger a convention-wide ballot. After vociferous protests from several GOP officials -- most notably Utah Sen. Mike Lee -- the chair vacated the podium for a span of several chaotic minutes. He returned with an explanation: A sufficient number of delegates from three states or territories had supposedly withdrawn their signatures from their roll-call-compelling petitions as to render the procedural move moot."

Obama has never been the man to heal wounds

The moment Obama lit the match  "Mike Lester illustrates president's first move in stoking racial resentment in America."

Althouse: "Clinton’s message has been that America is divided by race and gender, and suddenly we see a horrifying uptick in police shootings because it fits that world view."

Ann Althouse links to Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who posted: . . . "Have you ever noticed that professional sports teams are great at overcoming racism and getting everyone to play together? That’s because the coach has persuaded the players to see the team as their dominant identity. Trump can do the same with America."

NRO: Black Lives Matter – Words Have Consequences  . . . "Who really has blood on their hands? The killer and anyone who helped him. Who should feel guilt and shame? Each and every Twitter troll or Black Lives Matter marcher who called for violence and blood on the streets. For those people, sunlight is the best disinfectant. They should be relentlessly exposed and discredited. And any movement that harbors them, that marches with them, or excuses their rage as somehow “understandable” or “justifiable” or “predictable” should be rejected. 

"Surely the Left will agree. After all, if they were willing to condemn Sarah Palin without evidence, surely they’ll reject Black Lives Matter extremism with evidence." . . .

The Fire This Time

"Though this month’s cop-killers are no BLA, they share the same twisted thinking."

Rich Lowry  . . . "Killing cops quickly moved from a rhetorical pose — the Black Panther newspaper gave us the phrase “Off the Pig” — to an actual imperative. The Weather Underground targeted police in a series of — thankfully — relatively ineffectual bombings. It was the Black Liberation Army, an underground force spawned in the poisonous split between Newton and Cleaver, that took up the mission with a deadly seriousness." . . .
"The United States has experienced an extraordinary period of social peace dating from the Rodney King riot in 1992 — more than 50 dead and $1 billion in damages — to today. The recent unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore can’t be compared with that five-day conflagration, or the urban riots of the 1960s. But order is always a fragile thing, dependent on the sense of the legitimacy of our institutions. 

"With the police under a withering moral and intellectual assault, politicized assassinations of cops, which a few weeks ago would have seemed a relic of the 1970s, are back."

Who Was Gavin Long?

"He rejected U.S. law and claimed allegiance to a fantasy nation built on a fantasy history."

. . . " The Washitaw Nation is, charitably put, a marginal movement. Its message is incoherent, its website nearly unnavigable, its reading of history inscrutably deluded. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that active membership is around 200 (with more, perhaps, registered on paper). Its version of black nationalism is far on the fringe, by no means the same as mainstream varieties that Malcolm X and others made fashionable. The fable driving the Washitaw ideology — that a great nation of Moors once populated the American continent — is nonsensical and entirely its own." . . .

Benghazi looms over the GOP convention first night

Mother Of Benghazi Attack Victim: I Blame Hillary Clinton For The Death Of My Son, "She Deserves To Be In Stripes"
. . . "This entire campaign comes down to a single question: If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?" . . .


Chris Matthews Scolds Mother Of Benghazi Victim: "It Was Wrong" to "Lie About Hillary Clinton"
. . . "I don't care what that woman up there, the mother has felt," Matthews said. "Her emotions are her own but for the country in choosing a leader, it's wrong to have someone get up there and tell a lie about Hillary Clinton. It's not true." . . .

GOP speakers fault Clinton on Benghazi deaths  . . . "The report last month by Republicans on the Benghazi panel accused the Obama administration of lethal mistakes, but produced no new evidence pointing to wrongdoing by Clinton.

"Clinton has said the Benghazi report "found nothing to contradict" the findings of multiple earlier investigations into the attacks." . . .

Media Matters calls some of what was said a "hoax".

Marcus Luttrell: “America Is The Light, And Her People Are The Goodness That Grows From That”
"Marcus Luttrell reminds us, in one sentence, of the purpose of America."