This is the kind of thing I don’t like about my beloved FR. When people excuse immoral or illegal behavior because it’s “one of ours.”
Crowley should apologize sincerely and recall her book or whatever. It doesn’t matter one whit that Hillary is a felonious lying criminal. That is a separate subject. She failed to be honest and that is something she needs to apologize for or she is not a good decent person no matter how smart she is or how much we agree with her. I’d be willing to forgive her.
I agree. Conservatives, the right, or whatever you want to call us, are held to a higher standard and in a sense that’s not fair. The press goes out of their way to cover up for leftists, but even a small infraction on the right is put in the spotlight.
But we actually have higher standards ourselves, and she needs to live up to these. It sounds like there’s a lot of non-original and non-cited material in the book. It may have been careless and unintentional, but I think she still needs to apologize and withdraw it.
I am going to take issue with this view on two levels. First, Crowley's work is not plagiarism because her work is original and transformative - she discussed the ideas of others to weave them into a synthesis and prescription for future action that is original with her.
Second, far too much is made of plagiarism. The exact crime of plagiarism is stealing someone else's work, taking someone else's original ideas . And so for it to be plagiarism she must be passing off as her ideas, ideas that were actually original with the person accusing her of plagiarism.
Generally known and reported facts are not original ideas. For instance she was accused of plagiarizing something from someone who recorded what Reuters reported. But, the original plagiarist does not own the report, Reuters does, and Crowley wrote that Reuters reported it. And she was accused of plagiarism for reporting something about Keynesian economics. Now, it would be theft if she reported ideas thought up by Keynes as her ideas, but she didn't. She stated they were Keynes's ideas. Someone does not gain title to those ideas, by being the first thief. The are Keynes's ideas, not Investopedia's.
The real issue is not plagiarism, but principles of good scholarship, which requires citing sources of ideas and information principally to provide evidence of accuracy. Avoidance of plagiarism is a lower standard. It merely requires not passing off as your ideas, ideas that belong to someone else. Now, generally I am a strong advocate of good scholarship to assure the provenance of facts and ideas. And there the issue is to ensure that the facts and ideas are not original with Crowley, not #fakenews, but in fact things that actually transpired or were actually said or recorded.
So, it is a valid criticism to state that for you, or for me, the value of the work would have been augmented by careful footnoting (if it wasn't all properly footnoted, something I don't know for a fact.)
Obama’s redistributionist scheme, however, is so much bigger than just the transfer of capital within his home country. For Obama, self-styled “president of the world,” the redistribution is global and not strictly limited to wealth. Obama and his single-minded band of leftists are in the process of redistributing everything American: our power, our wealth, our resources, our military and diplomatic advantage, our economic competitiveness, our leadership, our borders, and, yes, our unique exceptionalism.
....As dark a vision as this is, however, there is something even bigger and more sinister at work, something grander in scale and more destructive in purpose. We tend to think of Obama’s redistributionist agenda as limited to what he calls “spreading the wealth around” here at home. Obama’s redistributionist scheme, however, is so much bigger than just the transfer of capital within his home country. For Obama, self-styled “president of the world,” the redistribution is global and not strictly limited to wealth. Obama and his single-minded band of leftists are in the process of redistributing everything American: our power, our wealth, our resources, our military and diplomatic advantage, our economic competitiveness, our leadership, our borders, and, yes, our unique exceptionalism. These are the very things that built American greatness. We value them. He resents them, which is why he is constantly apologizing for them. His intent is to have every element of Americangreatness turned over to the rest of the world so that they may be watered down and ultimately eradicated. If his strategy were merely wealth redistribution here at home, we could roll it back with an emphatic change in leadership in 2012 and beyond. But Obama is not content to simply remake America, but to undermine her by placing redistributionism on steroids and then selling out every component of American greatness. He also knew that he had just a few years to accomplish this global dilution of everything American...
Crowley, Monica (2012-06-19). What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior's Guide to the Great American Comeback (Kindle Locations 143-147). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. From free chapter available at https://www.amazon.com/What-Bleep-Just-Happened-Warriors-ebook/dp/B006IY9HS8/ref=la_B000APHN82_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483840302&sr=1-1