Polticial Plagiarism and More WTFery
Oct. 11th, 2008 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaNow, I have a certain unhealthy fascination with plagiarism and unattributed quotes. So I probably notice these things more than most. So I paid attention back in February when Rodham-Clinton accused Obama of plagiarism in the "Just Words" speech. Turns out that Obama did borrow from a speech of a friend of his, and didn't attribute it, but did so with the friend's permission, so I would consider that more a "you need to give your speechwriters due credit" issue than actual plagiarism. (Biden has a history of borrowings and outright copying that I find much more troubling, but he seems to have kept his nose clean this election cycle.)
So I was annoyed with myself when someone mentioned in passing on one of Time.com's political blogs that Sarah Palin had similarly made use of an unattributed quote back in September, and that it was from a particularly troubling source. Troubling is right. While Palin didn't claim to have originated the quote in question, she didn't give a proper attribution either, referring only to an anonymous writer. Normally this is a rhetorical trick for "someone on my staff thought this up," or sometimes "we know this is a misquote so we're not going to attribute it correctly; surely someone did write down the identical misquote somewhere at some time." Turns out she had it correct- and it's from Westbrook Pegler, someone who was so far out there that the John Birch Society didn't let him publish in their journal anymore. He was an outspoken racist, anti-Semite, and anti-unionist, and (probably most important for this discussion) stated in 1965 that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises," speaking at the time of Robert Kennedy. Pegler lived long enough to see half that wish granted. Whether he was disappointed that the assassin wasn't a white Southerner is not recorded for posterity. He had also expressed disappointment in 1933 when a gunman shot the mayor of Chicago while aiming for FDR; Pegler was annoyed that the shooter got the wrong man.
Now, the little hay that was made of this at the time was that Palin had quoted an anti-Semite, and whether that indicated sympathy for anti-Semitism on her part. I'm not terribly concerned about whether the quote shows that; we already knew that her home church supports Jews for Jesus, which answers that question pretty definitively as far as I'm concerned. What bothers me is that the author of that speech chose to quote someone who was well-known for advocating assassinations of political figures. Given the behavior of the crowds at the McCain/Palin rallies recently, I am strongly suspecting that this was not coincidence.
I'm a bit surprised that the Republicans have harped so strongly on Ayers and Obama's tenuous link to him. You'd think they'd be worried that people would remember more recent domestic terrorists, and which side of the isle egged them on . . . unless they're preparing their crowds to head down that path again. I'm being cynical, I suppose, and reading rather a lot into a speechwriter's choice, but it's all rather disturbing.
So I was annoyed with myself when someone mentioned in passing on one of Time.com's political blogs that Sarah Palin had similarly made use of an unattributed quote back in September, and that it was from a particularly troubling source. Troubling is right. While Palin didn't claim to have originated the quote in question, she didn't give a proper attribution either, referring only to an anonymous writer. Normally this is a rhetorical trick for "someone on my staff thought this up," or sometimes "we know this is a misquote so we're not going to attribute it correctly; surely someone did write down the identical misquote somewhere at some time." Turns out she had it correct- and it's from Westbrook Pegler, someone who was so far out there that the John Birch Society didn't let him publish in their journal anymore. He was an outspoken racist, anti-Semite, and anti-unionist, and (probably most important for this discussion) stated in 1965 that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises," speaking at the time of Robert Kennedy. Pegler lived long enough to see half that wish granted. Whether he was disappointed that the assassin wasn't a white Southerner is not recorded for posterity. He had also expressed disappointment in 1933 when a gunman shot the mayor of Chicago while aiming for FDR; Pegler was annoyed that the shooter got the wrong man.
Now, the little hay that was made of this at the time was that Palin had quoted an anti-Semite, and whether that indicated sympathy for anti-Semitism on her part. I'm not terribly concerned about whether the quote shows that; we already knew that her home church supports Jews for Jesus, which answers that question pretty definitively as far as I'm concerned. What bothers me is that the author of that speech chose to quote someone who was well-known for advocating assassinations of political figures. Given the behavior of the crowds at the McCain/Palin rallies recently, I am strongly suspecting that this was not coincidence.
I'm a bit surprised that the Republicans have harped so strongly on Ayers and Obama's tenuous link to him. You'd think they'd be worried that people would remember more recent domestic terrorists, and which side of the isle egged them on . . . unless they're preparing their crowds to head down that path again. I'm being cynical, I suppose, and reading rather a lot into a speechwriter's choice, but it's all rather disturbing.
