If he was talking about Joe Biden, well, it wouldn’t be the first time theft came up in association with his name.

But he’s not. John Edwards is accusing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of stealing all his ideas.

The criticisms represent an apparent change in strategy for the Edwards campaign. Thus far this year it has directed most of its fire at Clinton’s campaign.

Edwards’s campaign also blasted Obama for parroting the former senator in a foreign policy speech he gave Tuesday in which he said he wanted to work towards ending nuclear proliferation. They said the senator has followed Edwards on a number of issues this campaign year, including healthcare, poverty and now nuclear proliferation.

As if nuclear freeze hadn’t been bubbling around liberal brains for decades. Maybe John Edwards stole it from John Kerry? Whatever.

“If you need any more proof that John Edwards is shaping the race for the Democratic nomination, you don’t need to look any further than Senator Obama, who has followed Edwards’s lead on healthcare, poverty and, today, eliminating nuclear weapons,” Murray said in an e-mail to The Hill. “Next thing you know, he’ll be rooting for the Tar Heels.”

Now they’ve just gone too far. The Tar Heels, at least in basketball, are a force for good in the world. John Edwards is not. The Tar Heels stand up for truth and justice and resolutely oppose those devils from Duke. John Edwards channels dead children to fool juries into awarding ridiculously huge financial judgments that he gets rich from. I am outrageously outraged that Edwards is sullying the good name of one of the NCAA’s most dominant programs.

Anyway, Obama fires back.

Obama noted Edwards’s dismay with the timing and language of the healthcare plans during last month’s Democratic debate in New Hampshire.

“I think John deserves credit for his proposal,” Obama said. “I know that he feels that he put out his plan first. You know, Harry Truman put something out 60 years ago for universal healthcare. I wrote about it in a book that I wrote last year, a plan very similar to John’s. The issue is not going to be who has these particular plans. It has to do with who can inspire and mobilize the American people to get it done and open up the process.”

Or, it has to do with the fact that liberalism hasn’t had a new idea in about 60 years so its adherents keep bringing up the same old ideas.

That’s how I see it.