Crock of gold

As in "it's a crock," not a pot.

This week's Melania speech debacle is a crock on many levels:

• Remember the liberal media that Donald Trump lambasts for its lack of balance & outright lies?  It's been intriguing this week, seeing how even NPR is distancing themselves from calling out Melania's plagiarism for the bold steal it was.  "Apparent" & "Possible" & "Claims of" have all been used to cover the bold thievery of Mrs. Obama's words.

• The statement from the speech writer that it was she & she alone who was responsible for the goof, the result of having taken notes from what Mrs. Trump had said & not realizing they were another's words.  Wow!  Usually, Whisper Down The Lane gets a bit garbled in the retell.  THE  STORY is that Mrs. Trump heard or read Mrs. Obama's words & was so impressed by them, she was able to repeat them basically verbatim to a speech writer as if they were her own words.  Again - WOW!!  And what WAS Melania doing, checking out Michelle's speeches?  That is one thing any communications director, let alone speech writer, would have absolutely positively FORBIDDEN, for lots of excellent reasons. 

• If you are a speech writer for a representative or senator, SCOTUS justice or state governor, it's assumed you're playing near the top of the game.  If you're writing a speech for the president, you ARE the top.  And if you are writing the speech for the wife of a presidential candidate, you swing with the best of them. Either the Trump campaign hired an amateur hour speech writer for an extremely important speech OR the writer inexplicably flubbed one of the core steps any decent speech writer takes - checking out what other people have said in the past.  Mrs. T's speech writer should have ben so versed in what Mrs. Obama said in other of her convention speeches - and Mrs. Bush & Mrs. Clinton - she could recite them in her sleep. 

As a former corporate speechwriter (and avid West Wing fan), I can tell you without reservation that the person(s) who wrote Melania Trump's speech was either a rank amateur, a spectacularly foolish pro, or a clever saboteur.