Plagiarism Stories Dominate News [UPDATED]
By NoQuarter on February 19, 2008 at 6:58 AM in Barack Obama, Cult, Deval Patrick, Hillary Clinton, Messiah
This is an even better, pithy contrast video, via Taylor Marsh. Yes, it’s from ET, but that’s actually significant — it means that the story has long legs, reaching throughout the MSM, in all venues.
UPDATE: Paul Krugman on “Hype and glory” at his NYT blog:
One thing I worry about a lot if Obama is the Dem nominee — and he’s surely the frontrunner now — is that there will be a backlash against Obamamania. Actually,it’s already starting — probably too late to have much effect on the nomination fight, but in plenty of time to affect the general election.
… But I just have a very bad feeling about the way things are going.
Then Taylor gets into the lampoon sites on the “Messiah” factor of the Obama campaign (as does the above video, with the fainting phenomenon and Obama playing “EMT In Chief” (and not very sympathetically but more to act like the big shot pretending to care, imho):
“Is Barack Obama the Messiah?” asks one of several Web sites lampooning the hyperventilation of Obama’s more overwrought admirers.
An example came from Jan Young, a 56-year-old convert from Hillary Clinton: “It’s almost like the Messiah,” she said at an Obama rally in Minnesota. “You feel something coming from him.”
When Oprah Winfrey endorsed Obama in Iowa, she proclaimed, “I believe he is The One.” It was a line straight out of “The Matrix.” … (Check out Taylor for the rest of the quote.)
Now I simply have to show you this screenshot of a great spoof site — I laugh every time I see it!
Then there’s Slate magazine’s “The Obama Messiah Watch,” run by Timothy Noah:
Is Barack Obama—junior U.S. senator from Illinois, best-selling author, Harvard Law Review editor, Men’s Vogue cover model, and “exploratory” presidential candidate—the second coming of our Savior and our Redeemer, Prince of Peace and King of Kings, Jesus Christ? His press coverage suggests we can’t dismiss this possibility out of hand. I therefore inaugurate the Obama Messiah Watch, which will periodically highlight gratuitously adoring biographical details that appear in newspaper, television, and magazine profiles of this otherworldly presence in our midst.
And there’s “Is Barack Obama The Messiah” from Townhall.com in January 2007 (some people catch on faster than others):
Apparently, Senator Barack Hussein Obama, D-Illinois, is the Messiah. The New York Times reported on Sunday that in Obama’s time at Harvard Law School, he “developed a leadership style based more on furthering consensus than on imposing his own ideas. Surrounded by students who enjoyed the sound of their own voices, Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.”
My admiration for Obama’s position as editor of the Harvard Law Review changed a bit after I learned it’s an elected job. (Bluntly, I suspected a bit of white guilt, as well as Obama’s very smooth style, was a factor in the vote. It’s just a guess, but i know a lot about how elite liberals think, and it had to play a factor.) Now we see that he was very skilled in maneuvering people, and getting them on board by making THEM think just how smart they were:
Also on Sunday, the Boston Globe reported, “These days, Obama is the hot new candidate for the White House, trying to end the warring in Washington with a warm message of unity and optimism. But years before taking that message to the national political stage, he was defusing battles large and small from the sharp-elbowed basketball games to the cutthroat classrooms at Harvard Law School.” And on the same day, the Los Angeles Times similarly reported, “At Harvard Law Review he showed that — on a much smaller scale — he had the savvy to maneuver through turbulent political waters.”
The next cracked me up:
Jesus didn’t get this kind of Sunday media coverage on Easter Sunday. It is no wonder Slate.com has a running Obama “Messiah Watch” dedicated to “considering evidence that Obama is the Son of God.”
The influential conservative Pajamas Media blog is taking a hard look at Obama, and the five “follies” that the GOP can get him on in “IN FOCUS: THE END OF THE OBAMA HONEYMOON?” — and remember, as Larry Johnson says, this is just a SAMPLING of what the GOP will do to Obama if he’s the nominee:
Barack Obama has glided along from long-shot to heir apparent with nary a scratch on him, writes Michael Weiss. All that is likely to change if and when he’s the Democratic nominee. Here are five random Obama follies to watch out for.
1. He plagiarizes his speeches (“Words, words, words.”)
2. His volunteers hang memorials to totalitarian mass murderers. [OBAMA-ITES, don't get hysterical; please remember this is what the conservatives will USE against Obama.]
3. His foreign policy guru travels to Syria to kibitz with murderous fascists.
4. He flip-flops on public financing.
5. He’s wavering on his Iraq withdrawal plan.
Weiss, the New York editor of the blog, provides links and detailed explanations for each of the five points.
Come on “No Quarter”….
Two HUGE International stories today concerning Pakistan Elections and Cuba Transition and you’re running this old story on Obama….? WTF…
This site has completely lost it’s way - it’s not a very good political attack site… It USED to be great on International Security Issues and our role in the World… any receommendations I could go for that information…?
You know the info “No Quarter” used to provide before they lost their minds over the Democratic nominee..? Maybe GlobalSecurity.org..?
Any recommendations..? Seriously…
Well this is a candidate who said in a debate he’d bomb Pakistan, and today could tip him closer to the oval office for four years.
There are hundreds of blogs covering Cuba alone . Check out Steve Clemons’ The Washington Note — washingtonnote.com — he just sent me the release of his piece on Cuba.
Maybe I’ll add a post about all that later… woke up at 1:30am here, and am going to try to back to sleep.
Also check out Memeorandum.com for all the blogs on Cuba. Then there are newspapers.
sorry mitchman i can think of no more important story regarding international security then that of the election of the next president of the united states …
i find your complaint to be disingenous at best.
I find calling a hommage plagiarism disingenuous at best.
Thank you No Quarter!
Oh.. and the reason Obama “listened” so well while in school???? He was looking for good one liners that he could use later.
For an interesting precursor to Obamamania, one need only remember the ABC TV movie, “THE WAVE.”
I keep waiting for Obama to say, “Ein Reich, Ein Volk!”
Right about now we REALLY need Ralph Nader to file and draw off some of the Idiot Vote…
Ah yes, we watched The Wave in our high school psychology class.
Draft Ralph!
Plot Summary of The Wave from IMDB:
I share the cynicism that many on this site have about an Obama candidacy, but regardless of the efforts of you and many other writers here and elsewhere, Barack Obama may end up as the Democratic nominee. Perhaps the considerable writing and investigative skills of the No Quarter team might be better used in attacking John McCain. I’m sure there is no dearth of negative information about the Arizona Senator that the fawning media has conveniently forgotten.
We are fast approaching the moment when either the Obama Fan Base will have to suddenly put all their strength and hope behind the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, or the Clinton machine will have to deploy its allies in support of Barack Obama. Is further polarization going to destroy the unity the party needs in the fall?
Here in “true blue” New York, the morning papers report a poll that shows McCain surprisingly strong in the state. If McCain has 40% of the electorate in New York at this point, we have our work cut out for us in the rest of the country. I agree that Clinton is the stronger candidate (although the New York poll doesn’t agree), but I emphatically do NOT want the next President to be a trigger-happy egomaniac with a major-league anger problem.
How about attacking Clinton and McCains warmongering towards Iran and Obama’s fence sitting? How about bringing up how the MSM and all of the candidates have ignored the 800lb gorilla in the room. The Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Not one substantive question asked by the MSM of any of the Republican or Democratic debates.
Hi, Kathleen.
And why do you leave out Obama, who voted consistently to fund the war, and failed to join the separate efforts of Sens. Feingold and Kerry to try to begin to bring the troops home? He gave them both his hind end. (Sorry, a single speech safe in the tony, left-wing environs near the University of Chicago — and before he had to sit in the U.S. Senate — does NOT count as courageous war opposition. Further, he never spoke out again to HELP any of those opposed to the war. Just one little speech.)
Further, Obama voted to confirm Gen. Casey which Hillary Clinton refused to do, particularly after questioninig him during his confirmation hearings before the Armed Services Committee.
Kathleen,
Ain’t nothin’ good for the Palestinians in that question being part of the debate. If we expect either Dem to talk about it, conventional wisdom, in all it’s tut-tut glory, will be deployed to force both candidates to the right of the issue. If you want eitheer candidate to be able to move left on this issue, you better hope it stays out of the campaign. Just stop and think about what the press is going to do in it’s oh-so-important-and-isn’t-this-just-shocking mode.
The press is the primary political opponent any Democrat faces. And the press will automatically go farther right than the American people are on this topic.
I have posted here many times that McCain was well liked in NY and that Obama could very well lose the state (and at minimum, he would have to run hard, taking away valuble time, effort and resources from the swing states). I have also said the same about California. This will be a wave election if Obama is the nominee, yes for McCain.
Tenet gets job at secretive N.Y. bank
http://www.upi.com/International_Security/Emerging_Threats/Briefing/2008/02/18/tenet_gets_job_at_secretive_ny_bank/6418/
WOW…when even ET seems to compare the
“fainting” vs the “middle class” policy talk….that’s really quite something. But is it too late to wake people up???? Will the full effect of the backlash come after these upcoming primaries??…and be replaced by huge remorse as Obama’s actual problem relationships come to the forefront??
I didn’t see ET, but Chris Matthews showed Obama speaking on five-Count them, Five- different occasions when someone in the audience fainted. Obama’s response was interesting,ostentaciously acknowledging the faint and calling for someone to help her. He reminded me of a faith healer-deliberately calling attention to it rather than have someone in security or what ever handle it.
Also, last night Larry King had a group of six commentators on to discuss the charge of plagiarism. The topic drifted along-Larry appeared bored-until the end of the show when Kellyanne Conway, a REPUBLICAN strategist said of Obama’s candidacy, “I’m not frightened of it. But it is — because he’s so undefined and so amorphous and so intangible, if you will. He’s banking on a bunch of intangibles. It’s difficult to strategize against that. Where is his record? What are his ideas? Where is the substance? Again, Hillary Clinton missed the opportunity to really make that the charge against him today, rather than this ridiculous plagiarism. She sounds like John Edwards and Bill Clinton combined. Who’s she to say he’s plagiarizing. She’s missing the opportunity to go back to substance, which is her strength.” At this point, Larry appeared to wake up and announce they should all come back another time.
A shift in the offing?
Jon Stewart is on tonight-Tuesday.
As with Bush, the real press, and groupies, dare not confront Obama’s incompetency and corruption, if they do, the whole house of cards falls, ie “OMG, we actually put someone this corrupt and toothless in office, allowed ourselves to be conned by this talentless moron.”
They need to save face.
But who really wants them, anyway?
A couple of months ago a young girl fainted during a speech by Bill Clinton. Chelsea went and ehlped her up, and the Clinton campaign made a statement that it was very warm in the room, causing the girl to faint and that she was okay.
The Clintons did not act like she was so overcome with excitement that she swooned, nor did they make a big publicity about it. They assisted the girl and that was that.
Obama apparently felt he could get a little more mileage if it happened every time he showed up. To me this is like Rudy’s wife calling him on the cell phone at every speech; it wears thin pretty fast.
Obama is acting like a rock star and this notion that people actually SWOON over him is just ludicrous. It is comical for them to stoop to this.
Marjorie, in our defense, we have posted innumerable articles on the amorphous quality of Obama’s talk-talk-talk. I didn’t see the King show last night, but will definitely check out what you quote.
Did you see my link above, and quote from, the Pajamas Media NYC editor? And that’s just one of many quotes we’ve brought up from the conservative / winger community. And DO SEE DCMediaGirl’s newest piece in which she reports on the disillusionment growing among the punditocracy.
Load of shit.
The plagiarism tells me the man is incapable of critical thinking, independent thinking, he’s a tool.
And we have one of those as President, perhaps it’s indicative of the republican strategists that they don’t get it either.
Not very smart people, shouldn’t be anywhere NEAR the white house, now should they?
When did American government start settling for such mediocre intellects, the Sara Taylors and Karl Roves of the world?
Damage to several undersea telecom cables that caused outages across the Middle East and Asia could have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union said on Monday.
“We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago,” the UN agency’s head of development, Sami al-Murshed, told AFP.
Five undersea cables were damaged in late January and early February leading to disruption to Internet and telephone services in parts of the Middle East and south Asia.
The Falcon cable has since been repaired, along with the Flag Europe Asia (FEA) cable which was damaged off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. The status of the remaining cable is still unclear.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080218163315.psfe6g65&show_article=1
This messiah persona seems to be taking on a life of it’s own. When I was a teen in the 60’s, John Lennon went from popular to notorious with an off-hand interview comment about how the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. He wasn’t making a serious comparison, he was using hyperbole to express his own personal amazement over their fast-rising fame.
The results were a wild-fire back-lash from the religious right of the time, including news footage of young folks busting up Beatles records in the streets in protest.
But the Beatles weren’t running for office. The only thing approximating a vote was how many people bought the next record album. It was a case of any fame being useful as long as they spell your name right. The office of POTUS is a little different. The vote is a contest.
The Obama-as-messiah perception may end up as - tail wags dog, then dog eats tail.
Senator Obama is a fence sitter (sat on the fence on the October 2007 Kyl Lieberman amendment) and Senator Clinton is a warmonger going along with the same “cakewalk in Iraq” zealots that she went along with when she voted for the 2002 war resolution and then she went ahead and voted “yea” on the Kyl Lieberman amendment.
Until Obama or Clinton commit to using diplomacy with Iran I will vote for Edwards in the March Primary in Ohio. Am also convincing lots of voters in Ohio to do the same.
Kathleen,
Do you know what Clinton said to AIPAC about Iran and what we needed to do?
Great essay on Anglachel’s Journal about Barry’s plagiarism:
Words Matter When Struggles Matter
http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/02/words-matter-when-struggles-matter.html#links
Yes, words always matter. Obama treats words with disdain, like he’s saying, “so what? no one is really listening.” Lazy, lazy.
HRC was an anti-war activist working for Eugene McCarthy’s campaign in 1968. Just saying, Kathleen.
From Talking Points Memo:
“IT’S ALL ABOUT AUTHENTICITY
By now, you’ve probably heard of the new attack line from the Hillary campaign, accusing Obama of plagiarism because an ad-libbed portion of his stump speech mimicked the language and rhythm of a two-year-old speech by his friend and supporter, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
Patrick told the New York Times that he and Obama freely exchange speech ideas and that he didn’t feel like a citation was needed.
The Clinton campaign held a conference call this morning to continue pushing this line of attack. TPM Election Central asked campaign adviser Howard Wolfson about Patrick’s remarks:
Wolfson’s concern for the public’s fragile expectations would be quaint if it wasn’t so transparently self-serving. Obviously, this isn’t plagiarism.
But like the flip-flop line of attack Hillary is pressing on Obama’s public financing pledge, the attack speaks to her campaign’s effort to undermine the very thing that has been the centerpiece of Obama’s candidacy: his authenticity.
Sure he gives better speeches than I do, the Hillary line goes, but the words aren’t even his own. He may talk a good game about public financing, she asserts, but when push comes to shove his position is the same as mine.
The attacks are intended to bring down Obama’s positives, to knock him off his pedestal. But it’s hard to see how they raise Hillary’s. Her argument, boiled down, is: “He’s no better than me.” (Or perhaps, less charitably, “He’s just as bad as me.”)
Judged as political rhetoric, it strikes me as equally ineffective as her earlier charge that Obama was “raising false hopes.”
Late Update: Jake Tapper reports on the same conference call I referenced above:
In fact, Wolfson seemed to say it wouldn’t be as big a deal if it were discovered that Clinton had “lifted” such language.
“Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric,” Wolfson said.
–David Kurtz”
Clinton is presented as the author of what is actually a ghosted book. The world learned that Barbara Feinman Todd wrote “It Takes a Village,” because the publisher inadvertently issued a press release announcing the true author; Hillary threw an ego fit and demanded that all reference to Todd’s existence be removed from the book and its press materials, which was presented to the world as if it were the product solely of Clinton’s late-night labors. This time around, the pages of “Living History” thank three people—the much-admired former White House speech writer Alison Muscatine, veteran ghost Maryanne Vollers and researcher Ruby Shamir—who are assumed to be the actual authors. But the cover and the frontispiece still boldly state, “by Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
But do I need a long book with Hillary’s name on it to decide how to cast her in what remains of my history? No. To tell you why not, however, I do need another writer who will express articulately what I do not have the time to express myself. In this case, that author is Berkeley economist and former Clinton Treasury official Brad DeLong. He writes:
My two cents’ worth—and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994—is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly….
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch—the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.
My ghostly thanks to Ms. Moore, Mr. Easterbrook, and Prof. DeLong. Wonder what they make of the new Potter book?
http://www.reason.com/news/show/33624.html
ah cee … this whole thing is about the lack of attribution nothing more and yet you go off the handle with a hillary indictment regarding health care that is dangerously close to blaming the victim. furthermore, you “borrow” from people who have an axe to grind because of their candidate’s position. i get it … you support obama and that is all fine and well; but, please dont pee on my leg and tell me it is raining. hillary did not start this controversy … obama did by doing what he did.
finally, cee … your comments reflect what i have read on pro obama cites today … the outrage of having him questioned is rather comical if it werent what i believe to be prophetic about this race. if obama gets the nod, and it looks like he might, how are y’all going to react when the real slime machine starts on him. when the republicans start their attacks will the obama followers, with starry eyes, continue to embrace the politics of change … you know when their man says we have to transcend partisanship. i dont know cee … i think obama needs to rethink this meme and his followers had better grow up, politically speaking, damn fast.
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So if he’s a speech monkey, who are his handlers? How will the people pay/suffer with him? I worry even more about all of his nefarious associates now.
We know who Bush’s handlers are and it got us into the war in Iraq and allowing private corporations to mine and log on public lands. His wanting to privatize Soc. Sec., etc.
By the way, if you haven’t already seen Silver City, please. do.
And to save anyone’s overly sensitive soul from going apeshit over the word monkey even though I was only using it as a performing animal, you can sub gecko or horse.