Irony Alert: Accused Plagiarist Arianna Huffington Accuses Bush of Plagiarizing… His Own Words

[Rheo]

Big Hollywood:

It was only a matter of time before the nutroots at Huffington Post would resort to desperation and utter ridiculousness in their frenzied Bush-bashing; behold, the unintentionally comical headline atop Huffington Post:

Before we go into the nitty gritty, can I just note the delicious irony of a website of repeatedly accused plagiarist like Arianna Huffington – who settled out of court for, what else, plagiarism! – falsely accusing another of plagiarism? Remember this?

Seemingly plagiarizing Larry King transcripts so she could crow about having a Clooney byline. The result was an embarrassing smackdown from an A-list celebrity and loss of credibility.

Her apology:


Then there are the repeated charges of plagarism:

Huffington was accused of plagiarism for copying material for her book Maria Callas (1981); the claims were settled out of court in 1981, with Callas biographer Gerald Fitzgerald being paid “in the low five figures.”[21][22][23]

Lydia Gasman, an art history professor at the University of Virginia, claimed that Huffington’s 1988 biography of Pablo Picasso, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, included themes similar to those in her unpublished four-volume Ph.D. thesis. “What she did was steal twenty years of my work,” Gasman told Maureen Orth in 1994. Gasman did not file suit.[24]

Maureen Orth also reported that Huffington “borrowed heavily for her 1993 book, The Gods of Greece.”[25]

Huffpo itself was caught plagiarizing (the term comes from this Time magazine article) by lifting passages from Chicago publications. Huffington blamed it on an “intern.” (So interns write the copy at Huffpo?) The New Republic caught her taking material from someone else without attribution for one of her speeches.

Now Huffington blogger Ryan Grim over at Huffington Post has declared that George W. Bush is guilty of plagiarism. His evidence? Bush lived through events, which have been reported by Bob Woodward and some of his aides. Because Bush recounts the events in a similar fashion, he’s guilty of plagarism! The more simple and straightforward answer, that those previous books accurately recorded events, Grim never considers. Nor does he actually investigate whether the same thing occurred in books published by Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton.

This is nothing more than a nasty attempt to inject “Bush plagiarism” into the blogosphere. It’s actually one of the Post tags on the story. One can only wonder if he considered how his boss Arianna Huffington ever found herself in this situation. Did he ever ask whether she ever recounted a story that has been reported somewhere else in a similar fashion? Does she want to be held to that standard?

[SrWoodchuck]

Rheo! Thanks for the post!

 

.......and keep the heat on, Dana Luscious Loesch!

[AceRimmer]

Ah yes. He may be retired to private life, but BDS is still alive and kicking with the leftwingnut crowd.

[ErnstBlofeld]

She is grasping at straws