Posted on 06/11/2009 5:52:54 AM PDT by OK Right
Politics: A Lexi-Con Job
By Oscar De Los Santos and Kelly L. Goodridge
No doubt about it: the liberals are STILL afraid of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Their latest attempt to smear her comes courtesy of (surprise, surprise) “The Huffington Post,” by way of one Geoffrey Dunn. A close look reveals nothing but a Lexi-Con job – on the part of Dunn, not Palin. In fact, the left is guilty of far more serious rhetorical conning of late, thanks to Maureen Dowd and President Barack Hussein Obama.
Palin introduced Michael Reagan at a speech last week. Dunn believes she lifted part of her introduction from a 2005 essay co-written by Newt Gingrich and Craig Shirley.
During her introduction, Palin stated, “We have to remember first that Ronald Reagan never won any arguments in Washington. He won the arguments by resonating with the American people.” In their essay, Gingrich and Shirley assert, “Reagan never won an argument in Washington. Reagan won his arguments in the country with the American people.” Palin also advised: “We would do so well to look back on those Reagan years as he championed the cause for freedom and then he lived it out as our president -- cheerfully, persistently and unapologetically." The Gingrich essay claims that “Cheerful persistence rather than easy victories were the keys to Reagan's career.”
As conservative college professors (an endangered species), OK read literally hundreds of student essays each year. We know what does and does not constitute plagiarism. Palin would be guilty of plagiarizing the Gingrich-Shirley essay if she didn’t give the authors credit. She did – twice – during her introduction. It’s obvious she was trying to make it clear that she was borrowing from Gingrich and Shirley. At worst, she might be guilty of not re-emphasizing her source during instances when her speech comes very close to repeating Gingrich and Shirley’s ideas by using slightly different language.
Why would Dunn want to smear Palin? No big reason, really – unless you consider that he’s writing a book about her and is likely trying to create Palin dirt to expose. Ultimately, it’s a non-issue, unlike a recent liberal verbal theft.
Palin’s sampling is a far cry from Maureen Dowd’s outright word burglary. Dowd lifted “Talking Points” website editor Josh Marshall’s terminology and cast it as her own in a recent New York Times essay.
In the essay, Dowd slammed the Bush administration with these words: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”
In an essay published the week before in “Talking Points Memo,” Josh Marshall wrote the same sentence. The only difference is that Dowd substituted “the Bush crowd was” for Marshall’s “we were.”
When bloggers started noticing the similarities, Dowd tried to explain the gaffe in this fashion: “i [sic] was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent – and I assumed spontaneous – way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but [sic], clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall [sic] without mentioning that to me (“Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line from TPM’s Josh Marshall,” “The Huffington Post,” May 17, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/17/maureen-dowd-admits-inadv_n_204418.html). If this is the case, Dowd via her explanation throws a friend under the bus to erase some of her shame. Moreover, her rhetorical thievery showcases an eidetic memory she’s never boasted about in the past!
Politics is a game of clever wordplay, but it should be honest wordplay. That’s far from the case much of the time. And sometimes the Lexi-Con is not even plagiaristic but still designed to fudge the truth.
Take, for instance, Barack Obama’s recent talk about how his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz. How convenient to be able to make such a claim on the eve of European Apology Tour Part II. Except that the uncle – one Charles Payne – came out and countered the president publicly: “I don’t buy that. I was quite surprised when the whole thing came up and Barack talked about my war experiences in Nazi Germany. We had never talked about that before” (“Spiegel Interview with Obama’s Great-Uncle,” May 26, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,626703,00.html). Why would Obama have his uncle involved in liberating the wrong camp? Payne says he doesn’t know “where Obama came up with the fictitious Auschwitz connection . . . it was Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp” (“Obama’s Uncle: He’s Using Buchenwald for Political Purpose,” Newsmax, May 28, 2009, http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/obama_buchenwald/2009/05/28/219295.html).
So here’s another rhetorical lexi-con job that we can attribute to liberals. Very likely, Obama’s advisors decided that boasting about an uncle who helped liberate Auschwitz had greater dramatic punch than saying his uncle helped liberate Ohrdruf. Which has more name recognition, Auschwitz or the Buchenwald sub-camp?
Bottom line: lexi-con jobs are alive and well in the post-2008 presidential election era – perhaps more than ever. And if anyone is guilty of twisting language like abused rubber bands, it’s the liberals.
They’d best have a care. Abused rubber bands have a habit of snapping and stinging their abusers.
The left is deathly afraid of this woman from Alaska because she has the ability to fire up normal people to get out and vote.
McCain did not inspire anyone to get out and vote.
Palin has the potential to energize normal people in the next election, and that has the left browning their pants.
The polls don’t matter and don’t tell us anything. What matters is how many people actually get off their couches and get out and vote.
And that is why all the small-minded leftists are finding ways to slime her - Letterman being one of them.
Go Palin!
But the MSM writes and promotes their LIES about conservatives, while discounting, excusing, and submerging the deliberate lies the liberals create about conservatives.
I don’t know how to fight that large an influence.
Well stated.
(compared to the ammo/amplification “they” have, we have very litte...but fight on we must)
First recognize it for what it is. A bunch of lies being massed produced for the purpose of gaining power.
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