American Thinker:
Montana Democratic Senator John Walsh has been nailed for plagiarizing his Army War College thesis from 2007, but Democrats are standing “100%” behind him.
Read this guy’s disingenuous excuse and explanation. It’s not worthy of his rank or the uniform he wore.
Walsh dismissed the notion that the allegations will harm his campaign. He also chafed at the suggestion that he deliberately presented other scholars’ work as his own in his 2007 thesis to earn a Master of Strategic Studies degree at the U.S. Army War College.
“I admit that I made a mistake,” he said. “My record will be defined by (Walsh’s service in) the National Guard, not by a few citations that were unintentionally left out in a term paper.”
Lie #1: It was not a “term paper.” It was his thesis – a monumental difference. The thesis determined whether or not he would get his Masters degree.
Walsh said that when he wrote the thesis, he had post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in Iraq, was on medication and was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran’s recent suicide.
“I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor,” the senator said. “My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment.”
OK – my sympathy for your condition. But how did PTSD prevent you from knowing you were using vast amounts of work from other scholars?
The paper includes a series of unattributed passages taken from the writings of other scholars.
The first page borrows heavily from a 2003 Foreign Affairs piece written by Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a 2009 book by Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer called “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.”
Sharansky is a former Soviet dissident and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Dermer is the Israeli ambassador to the United States.
All six of the recommendations that Walsh listed at the end of his paper are taken nearly word-for-word without attribution from a Carnegie paper written by Carothers and three other scholars at the institute.
Carothers and a Dermer spokesman declined to comment.
One section is nearly identical to about 600 words from a 1998 paper by Sean Lynn-Jones, a scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a research institute at Harvard.
Incredible. And the guy refuses to talke responsiblity:
While acknowledging 25% of his thesis was copying others’ scholarship word for word, the other 75% has to be considered as suspect. As such, Walsh should be stripped of his master’s degree. Using his PTS condition as the reason why he committed plagiarism is a bit of stretch, a long stretch. If I had copied the work of others in the writing of my thesis, and if my research was found to be fabricated, surely my master’s degree would be stripped. Much of thesis writing is about original thought and original research. Reference to existing published work serves as a starting point where current knowledge and thought stands.
Seriously, if one is going to plagiarize another’s work, at least have the decency to learn the art of paraphrasing.
There are so many electronic means of determining plagiarism, it is ignorant to even try to write 3 words with out a citation. Anyone this stupid should not be elected to the senate, but then look who voters have elected in the past! “Stand up” Joe Biden is a good example.