Melania Trump Plagiarizes Michelle Obama's 2008 DNC Speech

Last night I watched much of the first night of the Republican National Convention from Cleveland, and got so tired of the race bating and sellout kneegrows like Sheriff David Clarke being on the podium that for self-care reasons I turned it off before Melania Trump's speech and started following the far more entertaining Twitter commentary.

I then noted before the media finally started talking about it increasing chatter on Twitter that started sharing Jarrett Hill's observation that Trump's speech had two paragraphs that were strikingly similar to one that First Lady Michelle Obama gave at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

The Hill observations turned out to be so on point that the networks were after initially praising the Melania Trump speech, forced to address the growing plagiarism controversy as the Trump campaign scrambled to try to respond to it.



So what's the big deal about plagiarizing speeches?  Allegations of it sank Joe Biden's 1988 presidential campaign.  Careers have gone down in flames for it, and people have been expelled from colleges and universities for doing so.

When you also listen to the Trump speech, the message sounds oddly out of sync when you consider that Melania grew up in Slovenia.   It was part of Communist run Yugoslavia at the time she was born in 1970 before the 1991 breakup of that country and Slovenia's subsequent independence after a brief ten day war.

As I also pointed out in my take on this growing controversy on my Twitter feed, this was a real time example of a common problem in terms of Black intellectual property being jacked by whites for their own personal gain.  This happens far too often with Black women having their words repeatedly stolen by white women with little to zero credit for being the originators and creators of those words and receiving no compensation for it.

Trump also claimed in an interview before she went on the RNC stage she'd written the speech without much help in what was expected to be a moment to introduce Melania to the world and humanize her reprehensible husband..

Of course Twitter gleefully went all in on their dragging Melania Trump mission, and the hashtag #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes quickly rose to become the number one Twitter hashtag along with the #BeckyWithTheBorrowedSpeech one as Trump supporters and his campaign team tried to furiously spin away what happened.

This plagiarism situation was also dripping with irony.  The plagiarized section is discussing honesty, character and integrity, and since you couldn't find nice things to say about The Donald, so you steal them from a speech the FLOTUS is giving about her hubby the POTUS who does role model those qualities.

First Lady Michelle Obama has been demonized, misgendered, had her intelligence questioned despite possessing two Ivy League degrees earned with stellar grades and has been called everything but a child of God by the conservative movement.

But when it comes to speech writing, either Trump or someone on her husband's campaign team had no problem stealing the FLOTUS' eloquent August 25, 2008 words to put in Melania's teleprompter.

We'll have to see how this latest Trump campaign mess plays out not only for the rest of the RNC, but also for Melania Trump and this train wreck of a presidential campaign

Already Getting Started On The TDOR 2010 List

We in the international trans community are just wrapping up the many TDOR events we held for 2009, and as Leona Lo reports courtesy of The Guardian, there's already been a transwoman death to possibly kick off our 2010 list.

32 year old Brenda Paes was found dead November 20 in her apartment that she shared with her friend Natalie after a mysterious fire.

But this one has the earmarks of a murder, since her roommate Natalie is one of the people involved in a widening political scandal that eventually forced the October 27 resignation of prominent Italian center-left politician Piero Marrazzo.

The widening scandal is now threatening the center-right government of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The scandal started with four members of the Carabinieri, the Italian paramilitary police force offering for sale to the press a video shot August 2 of a sexual tryst involving the former governor of the Lazio region, which surrounds Rome.

Investigators then discovered a longer video allegedly showing Marrazzo in the company of two transsexual sex workers. Brenda admitted to local magistrates investigating the unfolding drama on November 2 that she recorded the images on her mobile phone.

Brenda was found lying naked on the floor in her bedroom loft next to some packed suitcases. She apparently died of asphyxia after a fire started in a bag of old clothes next to the door.

Arousing particular suspicion in what police described as a complex crime scene was the presence of Brenda’s laptop computer partially covered by water in the sink.

One of the people who also shares the hypothesis that Brenda was murdered is none other than Italy's first trans MP, Vladimir Luxuria.

“I immediately thought it was murder. It made me really angry when I heard them talking about suicide,” Ms. Luxuria said. “The person who ordered it is a powerful individual who feared meeting the same fate as Marrazzo. This is a Mafia-style murder and it sends the message: don’t talk.”

Ms. Luxuria said Brenda was a vulnerable person whose photo and address had been published in the press and who had received no protection despite being a witness in a sensitive political scandal.

“Brenda had her mobile phone stolen two weeks ago. No one seems to have asked whether the phone had value as an object or because of the information stored in its memory,” Ms. Luxuria said. The former MP says she knows at least 10 of her political colleagues who availed themselves of the sexual services of transsexuals.

“The person behind this could just be a single individual, but someone in a very high position. I hope this doesn’t end up as yet another Italian political mystery.”

She and others, including Piero Mazzarro's lawyer are calling for Brenda's roommate Natalie to be put under immediate police protection in the wake of Brenda's death.

But sadly, thanks to an unfolding political scandal, Brenda Paes may have also just become the first name we read at the 2010 TDOR ceremonies.