NY Times Best Selling Author and conservative diva Ann Coulter, author of #1 Best Seller “Godless” will be on the show tonight and we will discuss among other things the latest charge against her that she plagiarized four times in her book. I admit that when I first heard the allegations on the Keith Oberman Show (seen by the hundreds of people each night on MSNBC) I was very surprised. After more thorough investigation however, even those in the left-blogosphere concur that there is nothing to the accusation.
The Daily Kos had this to say:
TPM Muckracker has an itemized list of Ann Coulter’s supposed plagiarism, and sorry to say, there’s not much there.
Coulter is a lot of things, but it doesn’t look like plagiarism is one of them.
Lefty Blogger Josh Marshall had this to say:
To me personally, some of the examples/accusations seem strained — simply similar statements of the same basic facts. And sometimes there are only so many ways to describe one set of facts. In other cases the similarities of the wording strike me as hard to see as a coincidence. Especially when there seem to be multiple instances of similarities in the same column coming from the same source.
I do disagree with what Markos concludes with however:
What these examples show is that Coulter is a lazy writer who rips off other people’s research, but stealing someone else’s arguments isn’t “plagiarism”. It’s just being a lazy, unimaginative writer.
No, that is not what it shows Markos. It shows that like Josh Marshall just said (the quote you yourself posted on your own blog) that there are only so many ways you can word historical events. Muckraker came up with 4 similarly worded passages describing historical events in a 300 page book with 17 pages of small print footnotes. Trust me Coulter is maticulous in her attribution. I have read every one of her books (execpt for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” and she is among the most scrupulous foot-noters in the business. She is anything but “lazy.” Lazy people don’t write perennial best-sellers year after year as she has done. Lazy people often go on blogs like the Kos however and say stuff like “Bush Lied” and “War for Oil” and “tax cuts for the rich” blah blah blah…
Where Markos really gets it wrong however is when he says: “but stealing someone else’s arguments isn’t “plagiarism”. It’s just being a lazy, unimaginative writer”
No Markos, when you do “steal” other people’s ideas and analysis that is by very definition- plagiarism. For a case study in how one successfully plagiarizes in this manner check out Dorris Kearns Goodwyn. But that is not what Coulter did.
The bottom line in all this is that the left has been unable to rebut any of the many salient claims Ms. Coulter has made in her books, so rather than arguing the issues in an intelligent thoughtful manner, the MSM lapdogs like Oberman do what they always do to conservatives like Coulter who make them look foolish by exposing to the world who they really are, they smear them with unsubstantiated allegations like they did in this case. They call her a “plagiarist” which is basically like saying: “Coulter Lied.”
Hmmmmmmmmm. Where have we heard that one before?
HT- Tom at Bizzy Blog