The man who got Mary Burke into that "plagiarism" trouble comes forward one with of the most ludicrous exercises in self-justification I have ever read.

Published in that venerable journal, The Atlantic, it's Eric Schnurer. He kept quiet during the campaign, after he got fired, which happened after he advised Burke's people that they should fire him, because, you know, they needed him for ideas, for that jobs plan and then for what to do when the jobs plan looked like a lame cut-and-paste job. And now he has this new idea to blame others for the blame he carried only exactly as long as there was a political stake in shifting the blame onto him. He's got a career to rebuild, after all. 

You can read the whole thing. I'm just highlighting what I struck me as ludicrous:

[Mary Burke's] opposition spent a good deal of time attacking her for not “having a plan” until she issued the obligatory document. It was to be expected, however, that whatever she released would be subjected to merciless and unfair attack, because that’s how we conduct campaigns nowadays. 

So, presumably, that's what you're doing now, since that's what we do nowadays. It's all always "merciless and unfair," according to you.

Burke faced the competing demands of putting together a “plan” as quickly as possible and making it as perfect as possible. That’s where I came in....

You, with your reputation for speed and approximate perfection. By the way, why was this person running for governor without a plan? Why did this emergency exist in the first place? 

Reading the subsequent coverage of what occurred, you’d get the impression that my staff and I lazily cut-and-pasted our way through the project. In fact, the Burke jobs plan went through at least a dozen drafts and near-endless rewrites.... This was no cut-and-paste job. The Burke jobs plan went through at least a dozen drafts....

But if they had only rewritten the verbatim material from other sources, there would never have been a Buzzfeed exposé.

We knew better than simply to mail in work we’d completed elsewhere, acutely aware of the kind of cheap shots a candidate would incur if we did. 

You didn't know better than to make the plan a target for a Buzzfeed journalist. It wasn't a "cheap shot" from Scott Walker. It was a journalist, Andrew Kaczynski, doing his job. And it wasn't "cheap." Hypocritically, you are taking a cheap shot.