Yet more proof that Paul Ryan is intellectually bankrupt

Apparently Paul Ryan isn’t averse to plagiarizing from other people’s works when it suits his own purposes.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Paul Ryan told a touching anecdote of a poor boy who said he didn’t want a free lunch at school, but a brown bag one, because “a kid who had a brown paper bag had someone who cared for him.” Though Ryan presented this as a modern tale of government dependence and family decline — people don’t want “comfort,” Ryan said, but “dignity” — the author of the book the story appears to be cribbed from says she met the kid in 1986.

“You know, this reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson,” Ryan said, referring to  a member of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s cabinet. He continued:

“She once met a young boy from a very poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise, he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown paper bag, just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid who had a brown paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”

But as a Talking Points Memo commenter noticed, the story appears to be cribbed from a 2011 book called An Invisible Thread. Author Laura Schroff says it’s the story of her friendship with Maurice. Her website says, “We met on 56th street in Manhattan in 1986, when I was a 35-year-old single, successful ad sales executive, and he was an 11-year-old homeless panhandler.”