Is there a plagiarism double standard?

Monday night, when Melania delivered her speech, conservative media and supporters exploded with praise. But by Tuesday morning, it was revealed that multiple lines toward the end of the potential first lady’s speech bore a striking resemblance to a speech future first lady Michelle Obama gave in 2008.

Even worse, they were lines about character and hard work, supposedly heartfelt lessons taken from her childhood.

The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump has a side-by-side video comparison of the lifted passages. Melania told NBC’s Matt Lauer that she “read once over [her speech] and that’s all because I wrote it with as little help as possible.” But a Trump campaign spokesman said, while defending Melania’s speech, that she had a “team of writers.”

I’m more inclined to believe there was a “team of writers” working on the speech, which would make the plagiarism not only terrible, but also stupid. There’s literally video evidence of Obama’s speech. It was only a matter of time before people noticed.

Still, Melania is a potential first lady, not the actual candidate, so the criticism she’s getting seems outsized compared to the plagiarism (h/t Heavy) of past candidates Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

When Biden was running for president in 1987, he had to admit to plagiarizing a law review article when he was in law school. He claimed at the time that his plagiarism was not “malevolent” but merely a “mistake” because he “misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully.”

We’ll have to take him at his word that back in the 1960s, people who made it through high school, their undergraduate studies and into law school wouldn’t properly know how to cite sources.

Biden also stole passages from the Welsh Labor Leader Neil Kinnock during a visit to a state fair. Biden has used quotes from Kinnock before, but had always credited him.

Biden also straight up stole details from Kinnock’s life and used them as his own, like claiming he was the first in his family to go to college. Oh, and Biden also stole passages from Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.

Despite the blatant, serial plagiarism, Biden has been our vice president for the past eight years. It might have kept him from the presidency (not really, he wasn’t that well known in 1988 and in 2008 he was up against Barack Obama), but it didn’t keep him from the Senate or the vice presidency.

President Obama also plagiarized a part of a speech. In 2008, he gave a speech that sounded suspiciously similar to a 2006 speech from then Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Patrick closed party ranks and defended Obama after the accusation.

The biggest sin from Melania’s plagiarized speech is that it was supposed to humanize her husband Donald. Now that’s all been lost as all the media is focused on is the plagiarism. Perhaps that’s why there’s so much attention being paid to the potential next First Lady when the two top Democrats occupying the White House are also both guilty of stealing passages.

Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.