Oh, this is embarrassing: apparently, a hardcore Lefty group had made the claim that incumbent Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown had plagiarized a somewhat obscure Democratic candidate for North Carolina state Senate. If you’re asking yourself why Brown would do something like that, congratulations: you’re showing one of the traits necessary to make a go with it in New Media. To wit, the ability to keep asking questions rather than just accept the first answer. In this case, it turns out that the aforementioned Democratic candidate (Hi, Earline Parmon!) had ripped off Scott Brown, not the other way around*. This revelation unfortunately comes too late for Rachel Maddow, who had to post an embarrassing retraction after accusing the Senator of plagiarism. As you can imagine, Red Mass Group** is taking a victory lap on this one.
Now, what was that brag of the mainstream media, again? “Layers of editors and fact-checkers,” or something like that?
Moe Lane
*By the way: now that I can shake a finger at this I’d like to note that this was a fairly silly scandal, and that I’d have turned up my nose at the ‘news’ that one campaign’s staffer had ripped off another campaign’s staffer. Unless we’re pretending that politicians actually create and maintain their own websites?
**I need to note for the record that RMG [or somebody on it, at least: again, to clarify] and I have fundamentally different opinions on same-sex marriage, and I seem to remember that this difference of opinion has been, ah, forcefully expressed in the past [on my part, to clarify]. On the other hand, I haven’t forced Rachel Maddow to retract anything lately, either. How one should handle this sort of thing is actually an interesting question, when you think about it…
[One last clarification: whoever it was that I (possibly mis]remember going round and round on SSM, it wasn’t Rob Eno, who is a good guy stuck deep in blue-state territory.]
Well, it wasn’t me either. I have an SSM card for this new phone I got and it works great, thank you very much.