McCain "Family Recipes" Stolen From Food Network

This is wonderful.

I knew that somehow by living in D.C. the worlds of politics and Food Network would collide--and they have. It was reported yesterday that Republican presidential candidate John McCain's website had seven recipes posted under wife Cindy McCain's section attributed as "McCain Family Recipes."

The only problem was they were not original family recipes, but in fact word-for-word copies stolen from Food Network's website, foodnetwork.com.


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"This past Sunday, Lauren Handel, an eagle-eyed attorney from New York, was searching for a specific recipe from Giada DeLaurentis, a chef on the Food Network. Yet whenever she Googled the different ingredients in the recipe, the oddest thing happened: not only did the Food Network's site come up, as expected, but so did John McCain's campaign site."

Umm... did the McCains not think anyone would bother checking these recipes? Do they not know that foodnetwork.com is the "#1 cooking site" in terms of traffic (according to Food Network)? I love how a simple Google searched foiled what probably would have otherwise gone completely unnoticed.

The Huffington Post has more side-by-side comparisons of the other McCain recipes lifted from Giada De Laurentiis and Gale Grand. A Rachael Ray recipe was also apparently tweaked with a few small changes.

The recipe section of John McCain's website has since been taken down.

UPDATE: The McCain campaign has told TMZ that the whole thing was a "low-level unpaid staff debacle" and that the intern in question has been "swiftly dealt with." Uh huhhhhhhhhh. And I bet it was the intern who came on to McCain; not the other way around. Paging: Monica.