By now everybody knows that MoDo totally and completely accidentally plagiarized Josh Marshall, and, like, stuff that Michael Calderone apparently cares about.
To me, it's kind of comical, but that's about it. This incident is not the problem with Maureen Dowd: the problem with Maureen Dowd is that she's... Maureen Dowd, and has a job that involves... writing. That a quote from Josh Marshall showed up in her column is strange and inexplicable. That she has a column for the New York Times at all is stranger and, uh, inexplicabler. There's something to gawk at, astonished, in every Maureen Dowd column. As our Molly I has amply documented, this is but the latest exotic beast in the menagerie.
The real fun with Dowdmarshallgate is with the wingnut reaction, which I don't have time right now to fully run down. But here's Insty, pointlessly linking to a bunch of shit he wrote that somebody published for no good reason, though perhaps it impressed morons. He seems to be arguing that the Big Problem that tangentially relates to plagiarism is that people only care about the Appearance of Ethics, but not the Mighty Spirit of True Ethical Truth. Which means, well, nothing. Here is some nothing, Insty complaining about the 1975 Modern Language Association definition of plagiarism.
Plagiarism may take the form of repeating another's sentences as your
own, adopting a particularly apt phrase as your own, paraphrasing
someone else's argument as your own or even presenting someone else's
line of thinking in the development of a thesis as though it were your
own. In short, to plagiarize is to give the impression that you have
written or thought something that you have in fact borrowed from
another. Though a writer may use other person's words and thoughts,
they must be acknowledged as such.
Like Nixon's concern about the appearance of a coverup, this standard reduces a matter of substance to one of appearances.
Uh... sure.
This is technically called "flogging a thesis," but there might be more to it than that: this would more appropriately appear to be "trying to skull-fuck a thesis with a fifty-cent dildo, and missing." The FUCK?
You can say a lot about the MLA that isn't very nice. And I have! But... the FUCK?
But the MLA rule seems as much as anything to be a post-Big Bang
application of appearance standards; its adoption in 1975, just after
Watergate, may not be coincidental. The MLA standard says that rather
than undertaking the hard work of deciding whether a piece is
plagiarized based on the kind of substantive evaluation urged by
Lindey, we should instead just look for similarities and, if we find
them, pronounce guilt.
Dear Lord. English comp instructors already don't get paid enough! But then, Insty does say:
If it were limited to the clumsy efforts of undergraduate copyists, the
MLA standard might be harmless and ultimately unimportant.
Whew! Except:
But on
further examination it appears to have marked yet another step away
from substance and toward appearances -- a step with impact reaching
far beyond the academy, among other places, back into politics to
impact (perhaps) the Presidency itself.
Which, you know, it doesn't. It is not a step with impact that has impact. Nixon was not running the MLA in the 1970s. I am almost very nearly certain of this.
This is all just silly, except that Insty has apparently been raving for hundreds of pages already about "Big Bangs" and other garbage he made up about how nobody cares about the TRUTH anymore, man, only trivial bullshit. He writes:
In fact, appearance ethics not only fail to foster better behavior in
those they govern, they also undermine the behavior of those who apply
them. One of the chief appeals of appearance ethics to its enforcers
(who include the corps of press and commentators) is that – much like
reprinting press releases as news – judging appearances requires little
knowledge of substance, allowing one to discuss the issues without the
need for bothersome research or thought. Classical thinkers on ethical
matters had a term for this tendency to avoid hard work. It was called laziness,
and it was not considered a virtue. Another appeal of appearance ethics
is that it provides something to talk about: when appearance ethics are
the rule, even an unsubstantiated accusation can be said to create a
bad appearance. Thus, even an unsubstantiated accusation provides grist
for the mill of news flashes, op-eds, and talking-head shows.
That sucks! I mean, for fuck's sake!
What a colossal asshole.