Alito jokes about Biden plagiarism

Alexander Burns at Politico recounted a joke made by Supreme Court Justice Alito about Vice-President Elect Biden's past brushes with plagiarism:

"To coin a phrase, in the spirit of the vice president-elect," Alito began, "you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need."

Alito paused before continuing: "Did somebody say that before?"

The justice’s delivery was clumsy, but to the laughing audience his joke was crystal clear.

Politico wrote, to give context: Biden, who clashed with Alito during the associate justice's 2005 confirmation hearings, dropped out of the 1988 Democratic nominating contest amid allegations that he had plagiarized both law school papers and his campaign trail stump speech.

IPBiz notes that Biden plagiarized five pages of a law review article in creating one paper during his first year at Syracuse Law. Accusations of stealing a stump speech from Neil Kinnoch have been tempered by the fact that Biden sometimes did cite Neil; the bigger problem there was that Neil's facts didn't fit Biden.

As some people know, Justice Alito grew up in Hamilton, NJ. Hamilton is the source of this year's Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.