If you thought it was bad when Barack Obama plagiarized Massachuetts Deval Patrick, or when Hillary Clinton started running around going all, "Change! Change!" in a deep baritone, then the latest plagiarism scandal of the Endless Campaign of 2008 will get your knickers in a knot. Here's what happened:

John McCain gave a speech yesterday on the Iraq war. "I detest war," he said. "It is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue…Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war," he continued.

It was quite moving actually. It was also back in 1996, when Admiral Timothy Ziemer said the same thing to a bunch of Navy Seals at a reunion, a viewer who wrote into Think Progress and busted the old man. Why have politicians not learned the lesson that every schoolchild has learned in the past ten years? If you plagiarize something off the Internet, the teachers will catch you.

EXCLUSIVE: McCain’s Foreign Affairs Speech Plagiarizes 1996 Address By Adm. Timothy Ziemer» [Think Progress]
UPDATE!: So it turns out this was all a bag of lies. ThinkProgress has updated their EXCLUSIVE with a correction: "It appears that Ziemer’s speech may have been plagiarized from McCain. According to the McCain campaign, the senator used these lines before Ziemer—in 1995. We regret the error." Oh we bet you do. We bet Ziemer does too, now that's been widely reported that he plagarized McCain. Boy his his face red. But there is still some scandal to be salvaged! That the speech was from 1995, which means McCain was not speaking from his heart about the Iraq war and was still lying to the American people. In a sense.