Marc Thiessen really is perfect for Fox News. First he tries to pump up his elderly and uninformed viewers ahead of the State of the Union address by telling them that Obama will lie to them, and then afterwards, informs those same Fox viewers that Obama stole his 2007 SOTU written for George W. Bush.
Only in Thiessen's fevered imagination did this happen:
"It was eerily familiar. There were lines like 'Our job is to help Americans build a future of hope and opportunity, a future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy, a future of hope and opportunity requires that all citizens have affordable and available healthcare, extending opportunity and hope depends on a stable supply of energy,' all of that came from the 2007 State of the Union from George W. Bush," Thiessen said.
Yeah, not so much. You can read the text of Dubya's 2007 speech here, but you just won't find anything in Obama's speech that matches Dubya's.
Furthermore, the line Thiessen claims was in Obama's speech simply wasn't there. At all. Still, that didn't stop him from making the full-throated claim that Obama plagiarized.
It's not the first time Thiessen has made this claim, either. During the Great Syria Debate last year he claimed Obama's speech was plagiarized.
Once again, there was no truth to the claim. Maybe Thiessen just doesn't understand what plagiarism is. It's not an amorphous thing. Here's the Miriam-Webster definition:
the act of using another person's words or ideas without giving credit to that person : the act of plagiarizing something
Unfortunately, Mr. Thiessen, George W. Bush isn't the first guy to imagine this country as one full of hope and opportunity, and there's a pretty bright line between Dubya's idea about opportunity and Barack Obama's.
A claim of plagiarism actually has to carry some evidence with it. Otherwise it's defamation.
