Montana Democratic Senator John Walsh has been nailed for plagiarizing his Army War College thesis from 2007, but Democrats are standing "100%" behind him.

Read this guy's disingenuous excuse and explanation. It's not worthy of his rank or the uniform he wore.

Associated Press:

Walsh dismissed the notion that the allegations will harm his campaign. He also chafed at the suggestion that he deliberately presented other scholars' work as his own in his 2007 thesis to earn a Master of Strategic Studies degree at the U.S. Army War College.

"I admit that I made a mistake," he said. "My record will be defined by (Walsh's service in) the National Guard, not by a few citations that were unintentionally left out in a term paper."

Lie #1: It was not a "term paper." It was his thesis - a monumental difference. The thesis determined whether or not he would get his Masters degree.

Walsh said that when he wrote the thesis, he had post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in Iraq, was on medication and was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran's recent suicide.

"I don't want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor," the senator said. "My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment."

OK - my sympathy for your condition. But how did PTSD prevent you from knowing you were using vast amounts of work from other scholars?

The paper includes a series of unattributed passages taken from the writings of other scholars.

The first page borrows heavily from a 2003 Foreign Affairs piece written by Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a 2009 book by Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer called "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror."

Sharansky is a former Soviet dissident and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Dermer is the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

All six of the recommendations that Walsh listed at the end of his paper are taken nearly word-for-word without attribution from a Carnegie paper written by Carothers and three other scholars at the institute.

Carothers and a Dermer spokesman declined to comment.

One section is nearly identical to about 600 words from a 1998 paper by Sean Lynn-Jones, a scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a research institute at Harvard.

Incredible. And the guy refuses to talke responsiblity:

Walsh declined to answer repeated questions about whether he believed he earned the degree if the thesis' conclusions were not his own.

"I know about war strategy and defense because of firsthand experience leading a battalion and the Montana National Guard," he said.

Wht he doesn't know about is honor and integrity.

Walsh's military record was first questioned in January when records revealed the Army reprimanded him in 2010 for pressuring Guardsmen to join a private association for which he was seeking a leadership role.

Walsh was adjutant general at the time and wanted to become vice chairman of the National Guard Association of the United States. In the reprimand, Army Vice Chief of Staff Peter Chiarelli said he questioned Walsh's ability to lead.

Political scientist David Parker of Montana State University said Walsh's thesis combined with the reprimand raise questions about the senator's integrity.

"If this were it, in isolation, I don't think it would be a big deal," Parker said. "But now we've got two issues of honor and competency."

Typically, rather than calling on their colleague to resign or  drop out of the senate race, Democrats are rallying around the plagiarizer. Receiving a Masters degree under false pretenses is apparently A-OK with Harry Reid and the rest of the Democratic Senate caucus. One wonders what a Democrat has to do in order to get the party to chastize them.