Maddow to Rand Paul: 'Good luck' trying to make this plagiarism thing about me

Friday night on "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow addressed accusations planted by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)'s office that she is a plagiarist. She also pointed out even more instances in which Paul stole large chunks of his speeches from other people's writing.

She began by hearkening back to the point in the 2012 campaign when former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) took on Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate. Ryan is and was famous for submitting budget after budget that seeks to ultimately do away with Medicare.

Rather than risk becoming the guy who wants to end Medicare, Romney attacked President Barack Obama, claiming that the Affordable Care Act actually seeks to end Medicare.

"In politics, this is a classic," Maddow said. "When you're getting attacked for something, just accuse your opponent of being guilty of the same thing. Whatever the attack is, if it's sticking to you, just apply those words in a substantively meaningless way to whoever's saying it about you, so at least it starts to seem confusing to people or the words lose their meaning."

A conservative blog has been chosen from the masses to carry water for Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on charges that the tea party senator has repeatedly stolen parts of his speeches from other writers. Representatives of Paul's office contacted the blog alleging that Maddow was once accused of plagiarizing a blog post.

"Sure, Senator," said Maddow. "Sure, 'sources close to Rand Paul,' you can try to make this whole problem for yourself about me, try to make me the story? Good luck. I can take it."

There are a lot more people, however, who have noted the problem Sen. Paul seems to have writing his own speeches, which, Maddow said to the senator, "You still haven't owned up to, you still haven't apologized for and you still haven't said you will fix."

In addition to the Buzzfeed article that pointed out what Maddow noted on Monday, now Politico has found even more instances of Paul plagiarizing in his speeches, once from the AP and once from the anti-LGBT group Focus on the Family.

Paul has since pledged to be "more cautious" in attributing sources for other people's work.

"This is called running from your mistakes," Maddow said. "The story has gone from bad to worse for Sen. Paul. I think because be basically refused to take responsibility for what he did."

Watch the video, embedded below via MSNBC: