For political junkies, there is no such thing as rehab.
There is only the perpetual fix from news media. No hit is more delicious and intoxicating than the ones that come from an American presidential campaign.
Political junkies do not really need their own works. The entire society is set up to deliver the drug to willing recipient. All news channels gave us something akin to coke. As if that wasn't enough, there came the political blogs, the crack cocaine of political addictions.
None of this, of course, is to make light of drug addiction and the havoc it wreaks on individuals, their families and societies. It is simply a metaphor. An apt one too, sometimes, considering what politics can do not only to the people caught up in it but their families and the people around them.
Such is the intensity of the political addiction of millions that way too freakin' early on a Saturday morning in late August, the world learned that Barack Obama- darling of certain media circles, presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee and an intriguing potential president - selected the 65 year old senator from Delaware, Joseph Biden, as his vice-presidential running mate.
No dysfunctional New Yorker, despite the speculation, the hype and the supposedly sage advice from every corner.
No John Edwards, thanks in no small measure to Edwards' political electoral dysfunction resulting from a pair of old politicians disorder: philandering and then fibbing about it.
Instead, we have Joe Biden.
The senior senator would add foreign policy depth and experience to the ticket, we are told.
The senior senator also brings with him some baggage of his own and it took not even 24 hours for the political junkies to remind us of Biden's theft - 21 years ago - of a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock:
NEIL KINNOCK at Welsh Labour Party conference May 1987:
"Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand"
JOE BIDEN IN Sept 1987 during his first presidential campaign:
"Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife... is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? ...Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It's because they didn't have a platform on which to stand."
This excerpt doesn't give the full text of either speech. Biden took Kinnock's references to hours of work and football and expanded the time involved in both.
To the uninitiated, this might seem like trivia. It may not be. The revelation of one form of theft - plagiarism is the polite, intellectual name for it - led to digging for others. Altogether, the Kinnock theft scuttled Biden's presidential bid in 1987 once it was discovered and widely reported.
The Kinnock story is already making the rounds of American media and it is only a matter of time before youtube sprouts old video tape of Kinnock in full lyrical, Welsh flight married to the clunkier Biden version. Political junkies can actually store up past benders and recycle them in a new binge.
Now there is a difference in the two cases. Patrick is a strong Obama supporter and its another thing for two men who are politically tied in the same country to use each other's speeches. Patrick and Obama might well be seen as merely representing two members of a political movement.
It is a different matter to swipe words from another politician in another country.
In the end, that may prove to be a distinction without being a difference. In a tight political race for the most important political job in the United States and arguably the biggest political job in the world, every possible fault, slip and foible will be highlighted. Which one takes hold in the popular imagination is anyone's guess.
Incidentally, the Kinnock speech isn't on youtube. Yet.
But other stuff is.
Like some of the savaging the Labour leader had at the hands of Spitting Image, the satirical television program.
let's see what use someone might make of this sort of stuff.
