UPDATED: At what point does a series of isolated incidents constitute a pattern?

Two Cents – You make an entirely reasonable point, and I’ve edited my post accordingly — preserving the original alliteration, even!

comment by Kady O’Malley on Monday, October 6, 2008 at 9:15 am:

Two Cents – You make an entirely reasonable point, and I’ve edited my post accordingly — preserving the original alliteration, even!

Medicare loving socialists . They listen to everybody even hateful avowed enemies ?

Four months before the Maple Leaf outbreak started claiming lives, Canada’s food safety agency quietly dropped its rule requiring meat-processing companies to alert the agency about listeria-tainted meat, a Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found.

Acting on free market trickle down economics is not plagerism . Neither is stealing a defendant’s lawyers line ” my little angel is innocent on all counts ” ?

the pertinent question here is whether owen lippert wrote the other two speeches in question as well.

if he did – and from what we’ve seen of high-profile plagiarists, especially in the american media, they very rarely do it only once: it becomes a habit – then what we have is a pattern of one person stealing other people’s work and (in theory at least) harper not knowing.

but if someone other than lippert wrote those two speeches…

Actually, Mr. Feschuk, I would say the pertinent question is whether Mr. Harper has tried to deflect blame in the past by shifting it to, then firing, someone else.
This would be just as telling a pattern.

On CPAC “Beyond Politics” last evening, Catherine Clark interviewed a professional speech-writer who had written speeches for Mr. Mulroney, Mr. Charest and others. He said most speeches are reviewed a couple of times by the person who will be giving the speech, plus others, for comments and rewrites.

It is this boredom with the umpteenth dissertation on a party’s position that so often transfixes the media on the trivial aspects of elections.

Hey, kin I use that? Of course, I’d be prepared to say, “JMD said ‘er.”

comment by JMD on Monday, October 6, 2008 at 10:13 am:Who cares? How much original thinking is there in pulic life? Not much that I can see. It is ideas that matter. Is this really an issue or just an interesting distraction for jaded media types who quickly tire of the standard stump speeches? It is this boredom with the umpteenth dissertation on a party’s position that so often transfixes the media on the trivial aspects of elections

No . The 1200 person PMO / PCO that harper’s staff of m.p.s report to is more powerfull in Canada than the Whitehouse that gw has set on fire in the USA .( Bill Moyer )

Kady,
To answer your question, I find it hard to take the latest “allegations” seriously when they only refer to snippets of speeches.

While I found the kerfuffle over the Howard speech overblown (and probably really meant as a distraction over the real objective, which was to link Harper to Bush), I find the two most recent charges almost laughable.

That, together with the fact that the media has almost totally ignored the fact that Stephane Dion presented David Suziki’s words as his own, lead me to believe this whole exercise is an example of the media blindly accepting allegations pushed by one of the party war rooms.

Sorry to say this because I recognize that you usually have high journalistic standards, but I think this time around just represents lazy journalism.

No one is saying anything particularly novel here. Our subjectivities are cut and paste. Life is plagiarism. The problem isn’t with Harper’s ethics but with the nature of human existence. Even our notions of the individual, of the authentic, of the truly unique and irreducible voice of the person are derived, part of our culture. From birth to death we speak as many original words as are required to effect a tense interstice in the conversation, to evoke a little distance, not to be overcome. Even our incomprehensibility, cherished and irreducible (and incomprehensibility is what any originality would amount to) is a sort of revenge, that is to say: contingent, directed. And if we were to say this direction is vague, then perhaps we have recognized that only the vague or ambiguous can allow of infinite things to be spoken, in the pure originality of the forgotten, untraceable withdrawal into the banality of the innefable.

One other point. As someone who formerly wrote speeches in government myself, yes it is true that ministers and others going over drafts and rewrite whole sections. However, it is also true that ministers leave whole paragraphs that they like entirely as “written” by the speechwriter. There is an unwritten assumption that the speechwriter has not plagiarized the speech from omewhere else.

Let’s remember Harper was the Leader of the Oppoition at the time and may not have been all that familiar with his staff. As a voter I’m more inclined to Assess him on his record as Prime Minister than what he did as Leader of the Opposition.

I can’t believe how lame the defenders of plagiarism are in their comments here.

Particularly hilarious is the idea that plagiarists ought to be commended for their adherence to the axiom that one should not “re-invent the wheel”.

!!!

- JV

ok, plagiarism is teh bad. Dems was juss jokes :D