Here we go again- some lunatic has decided that because Obama touched on broad themes that every single President in my lifetime has discussed, Obama somehow plagiarized his SOTU. James Joyner smacks down the stupidity. And before you all get all worked up because Joyner pointed out the speech was banal, let me note that EVERY SOTU is banal. That was kind of Joyner’s point.
Two things that Bush had going for him was that A.) we all know David Frum and others were writing his speeches and B.) if he did steal someone’s material, Bush would sound so stupid delivering it that no one would want to claim credit for the original work. There really is nothing too trivial for these wingnuts to get upset about, though.
cyntax
Thus SOTU drinking games. But as annoyingly banal as they are, I still think the Supremes should have to go.
ruemara
Most banal thing I read was the Conservative SOTU that Obama won’t give on Salon. What’s the outrage? Obama could scratch his nose and some wingnut somewhere would launch a 2000k screed on why it’s a sekretsinemuslinfascicommie signal to eat good christian snowflake babies without the special sauce.
SiubhanDuinne
Also, too, Obama said “My fellow Americans.” I’m sure I’ve heard that before from other Preznits.
cervantes
OT but generally pertinent to BJ: A discussion of the well-known “rich asshole” problem in social science.
Tim H
Can’t really care one way or the other. Yeah, it’s dumb, but the WH should have seen it coming (they could have asked Biden about it).
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
I suppose accusations of plagarism are a step up from accusations it was written by Bill Ayers.
ppcli
When Teddy R. spoke about the Square Deal and FDR about the New Deal and Truman about the Fair Deal, they were being, like, totally original.
FlipYrWhig
Hey, when being interviewed after the game, a player said that he thanked God and that he was glad he played on a team full of such great guys. I thought I had heard that before, so I checked. Turns out someone else said it too! Astonishing!
joe from Lowell
Wait a minute, Barack Obama didn’t invent the image of America as something that gives light to the world?
Really?
Gee, I did not know that. Having never actually read anything about American history, or paid any attention to political speech whatsoever, I had no idea that this language was a reference to the phrase “a shining city on a hill” from the Mayflower Compact. I thought he was improvising.
Chyron HR
Their first clue was that the closed capitioning said [PLAGARIZED].
mk3872
I like this quote from the US News stupidity:
Ummm, yeah, I certainly would HOPE SO!
Maude
Heard a rightie on the radio talk about taking the country back. He had a British accent and I was very confused.
bk
He said “God Bless America”. I think that I have heard that before.
jl
Nothing can top Palin’s claim that the USSR collapsed because it spent too much on the math, science and engineering it needed to win the space race. That is right up there with the Founding Fathers ending slavery.
All these wannabees could come up with is a plain vanilla bogus plagiarism charge?
Gimmee a break.
Midnight Marauder
This is pretty pathetic, even by wingnut standards.
Redshift
It’s pretty rich for a conservative to claim that a speech is plagiarized because the ideas are drawn from past figures, when the entire conservative movement is built on endless repetition of the exact same phrases.
If this speech was “plagiarized” then every conservative speech since Reagan (at least) is nothing but plagiarism.
Zifnab
He plagiarized cutting the corporate tax rate. That’s part of a Republican speech. Of course, closing tax loopholes was completely off script, but the important point is that Obama isn’t allowed to talk about things that other people have talked about!
debbie
Oh, come on, jl. Palin knows what she’s talking about — she was watching the 20-year-plus collapse from her doorstep.
fasteddie9318
@bk: Holy shit, are you serious? What a fucking fraud! He ripped off Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter…
I’m seeing racism everywhere these days, but I can’t shake that being part of this. The black president said the same things all our previous white presidents have said, ergo he’s stealing his material from them. None of those white presidents were stealing their material, they were just reallocating it from the collective pool of white president bullshit.
Redshift
@jl: I guess Fox’s “five pillars” smear didn’t catch on. Probably required too much explanation for the lizard-brains to get it.
MikeJ
Something I thought hilarious was the right borrowing the tropes of the left for complaint.
FlipYrWhig
@Midnight Marauder: What makes that so frightening is that, thanks to the yeoman work of Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg, we now know that Woodrow Wilson is history’s greatest monster.
Redshift
@jl: Honestly, conservatives ought to be outraged at Palin’s blunder, because that would mean that Kennedy brought down the Soviet Union, rather than Reagan doing it single-handed.
Steve
Joyner is completely right. Let’s look at my favorite example:
This is plagiarism? Evoking someone’s spirit? Hey, because we once had a President who was inspirational, anyone else who gives an inspirational speech is ripping them off!
Malraux
@joe from Lowell: Tracing it back only to the mayflower compact ignores that it comes from either Matthew or Jesus, though the explicit linking of America as being the city Jesus spoke of is from the Puritan days.
Regardless, complaining about Obama cribbing off of Reagan for that allusion is somewhere between dumb and you need a bib to catch the drool.
danimal
@jl: At least Palin and Bachmann are consistently novel in their idiotic public pronouncements. No plagiarism with that crew.
gbear
@Chyron HR: Win, although maybe it would have been better to provide references.
dmsilev
@FlipYrWhig:
Hmmm. If we assume that Wilson is history’s greatest monster, and if we also take as given that Hitler was history’s greatest monster, it therefore follows that Wilson was Hitler. And since Obama is following in Wilson’s footsteps (somehow), we inescapably arrive at the conclusion that Obama was inspired by Hitler.
dms
fasteddie9318
@Redshift:
Wait, now you’re peddling the lieberal slander that it was Kennedy, and not Reagan, who was elected in 1960 and destroyed the USSR by letting it win the race to the moon? Don’t you remember? It was right after Washington and Jefferson personally freed all the slaves by landing those marines at Eye-Wo Jima.
Why are kids today not learning this history in their high school classrooms?
Cat Lady
@fasteddie9318:
White presidents find, usurping black presidents loot. Get it straight.
jl
I read a blurb that one of the doofus male airheads on Fox and Friends has been spending air time reading comments from liberal blogs in an attempt to prove something or other.
This deluge of idiocy ignorance and childishness might be notable in the annals of such stuff.
I tell you, people, this needs to be documented. There needs to be an archive.
Will the supposedly credible corporate media be able to respond with any “factiness” at all? Or will Matthews just explode in incoherent outrage once in awhile?
PurpleGirl
SteveM at No More Mr. Nice Blog has two posts about this issue of the President being a plagiarist. SteveM writes about both the Felzenberg article and something involving Gingrich.
Bleh on the whole thing.
Redshift
@fasteddie9318: lol, how could I have forgotten?
Joshua Norton
Damn that Obama. Every single word he used has already been said by someone else! !
He should deal strictly in neologisms. Like the teabaggers do.
jl
@Steve: Really? Isn’t popular folklore and memory that JFK is space race, and Eisenhower is valedictory denunciation of military industrial complex?
I wish Obama would have plagiarized Ike’s military industrial complex speech. But he didn’t.
Redshift
@Steve:
Yep. Every idea proposed by a Democratic president must be an absolute original that has never been mentioned by anyone else or it’s plagiarism. (Of course, any idea proposed by a Republican president must be something that’s been kicking around since Goldwater, or it’s not conservative.)
Suffern ACE
@Joshua Norton: He should have given the speech in Spanish and Chinese, or Swahili, maybe even an entire language all his own.
Origuy
I like the comment by The Other Ed from Joyner’s blog:
Felzenberg’s article is yet another example of why some people should not be allowed access to Google without the supervision of adults.
MattR
@Origuy: That was a good one. I liked george’s comment over there:
Worse, he probably had staff speech writers write some or even most of the speech, which will get you suspended in any good college.
fasteddie9318
@Suffern ACE: Oh yes, Swahili would have been a good choice for the Kenyan usurper.
Tsulagi
@jl:
Cadets Palin and Bachmann are locked into their own little space (loon) race competition.
You gotta laugh, though. Pushed by her ODS/DDS and need for attention Palin took a pee on American exceptionalism nutters so revere just so she could say “No, dummy, the commies won the space race.”
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Redshift:
Let me remind you that intellectual property theft in defense of liberty is no vice.
Bob Loblaw
I don’t know anything about this Felzenberg guy, but he shouldn’t have referred to anything as “plagiarism.” That was bullshit.
Joyner has the right outlook (guys like Ezra Klein and Drum, too from what I saw). No wonder the speech was so damn popular. It was a veritable greatest hits compilation of the last century. Politically savvy as hell, but lazy. Which is ironic given the challenging purpose of the speech itself.
FlipYrWhig
@Bob Loblaw:
So, it’s the Girl Talk SOTU.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Malraux:
Jesus meant America, duh. American dispensationalism, baby.
twiffer
what bothers me is how many people don’t know what plagiarism actually is. ideas cannot really be plagiarized. it is the expression, the actual work on them that matters. if it were possible to plagiarize ideas alone, then pretty much all literature, film, tv, speeches, plays, etc. from, oh, 5000 BCE onward are plagiarized.
KG
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal: well, if you ask our Mormon friends, Jesus did come to America, so maybe he was
Morbo
Sheeit, Bush (and/or his ghostwriter) basically plagiarized for the content of his own damn memoir.
cleek
here’s my favorite part:
on the list of recent posts, this Felzenberg guy has a link to a 12/23/2010 post called Ideas for Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address. in it, he lists a bunch of ideas that Obama should address. and he uses a bunch of historic analogies and references in making his case for them.
and… Obama addressed them all.
but no, Felzenberg’s own ideas weren’t good enough for Felzenberg.
birthmarker
It’s always change/control the conversation with these people. Why give it credence?
DB
I think Glenzilla is on the HuffPo home page right now with a gun: http://i.huffpost.com/gen/241874/thumbs/r-AFGHAN-POLICE-huge.jpg
The Moar You Know
@fasteddie9318: You nailed it.
jl
@twiffer:
No no no, you are way behind the times. Competitiveness requires that everything imaginable be owned by somebody so they can make money off of it.
In fact, I am running down to the patent office right now to patent the idea of using other peoples’ ideas. If you can do it for genes and one click internet sales, I can do for this.
I’m going to be rich rich rich!
I’m looking forward to all of your royalty payments.
Brave Nee World!
Ian Preston
The fact that he has no idea what he is talking about is shown by the fact that the opening words of Felzenberg’s piece
are themselves closer to plagiarism on his own lame criteria than anything in Obama’s address.
FlipYrWhig
@twiffer: I was going to write a story about a strange man with great powers and a mysterious origin, but then I realized I would be plagiarizing Superman and Jesus, so I stopped.
Ash Can
@Chyron HR: You win the thread.
Chyron HR
@Ash Can:
“But [I’m] still hungry.” (Chrono Trigger, 1995)
srv
You’d have to dig pretty deep to plagiarize crap like Investing in the Future through Freezing Spending.
If Obama really writes his speeches, he needs an editor.
artem1s
Dan Quayle was right, it is a terrible thing to lose one’s mind. whocouldanode he was such a visionary.
for interesting read on more of Obama’s and every liberal, commie plagiarist ever, and the replacing of the Sun King (ADA GWB)Rug, see this…
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2010/09/new_oval_office_rug_made_in_we.html
Suffern ACE
@srv: Spending will be frozen. Investing will be increased. We will invest at some point in the future, when we stop spending and start investing.
Just like I don’t consider the money I put in my 401-K as spending. Spending is on stuff you don’t need. Like shoes. Or tighter belts.
Borrowing to spend is related to mortgaging the future which is different than borrowing to invest. One shows up on the balance sheet somewhere while the other ends up on the income statement…or something like that.
Where is that master of accountancy guy when you need him…
/s
rdldot
I’m telling ya, we are living in the age of ‘politics as farce’
SFAW
Fixed, to beat Pam Geller to the punch.
I thought they spoke Kenyanese?
“And did Those Feet, in ancient times, walk upon Kansas’s mountains green?”
I’m waiting for the wingnuts to speculate that Obama would have plagiarised “Ask not .. etc.” from JFK’s SOTU, if he thought he could get away with it. Pammy G, where ARE yoooo?
chopper
@Midnight Marauder:
i know. it’s some weak tea coming from a teabagger.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Suffern ACE: This is the problem with the way everyone thinks about the deficit. Don’t start with the income statement. Start with the balance sheet. If something is capital spending, then it’s offset by the increase in value of some other asset.
I haven’t heard this one in a while, but there used to be a lot of complaining that the government doesn’t use proper accounting (i.e. GAAP), and if it did, there are all these enormous liabilities that would show that we are bankrupt. Every single time I talked to one of these idiots, I tried to point out that, if you used GAAP, you also get to count all of the assets the government has. I really doubt that accurately valuing all of the assets and liabilities would show that we are insolvent, or even close to it.
Now, the real reason why that whole argument is stupid is because GAAP is specifically designed for corporate accounting, the nature of corporate assets and liabilities, and the fundamental purpose of a business. A government isn’t a business, and doesn’t have the same purpose. It also doesn’t have the same kind of assets and liabilities, particularly on the asset side. How much value do you assign to the power to tax? How do you account for the interstate highway system? Do you count military hardware because it can be used over time, or not since it isn’t economically productive? Who the hell owns the brains of everyone who is educated at state expense, anyway?
But, yes, you have it exactly right. There’s a reason that some expenditures are capitalized rather than expensed immediately.
At least no one has tried to tell me that the federal government should produce a statement of cash flows . . .
Edit: Though, now that I think about it, a statement of cash flows could be very instructive to a lot of people if they actually read it, given that the number for cash at the beginning of the year and cash at the end of the year are always the same: infinity. Which points out that there’s also the problem, in trying to put together a set of financial statements that there isn’t a constant unit of accounting.
Cris, a commenter at Balloon-Juice
Joyner fisks like nobody. That was fabulous.
trollhattan
Also, too, the salmon thing is way more complicated than how Obama framed it. He’s clearly trying to misreprelead us!
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014048900_salmon27m.html
Admiral_Komack
@ppcli:
Yep, ’cause it’s a BIG FUCKING DEAL!
Admiral_Komack
@DB:
Caption:
“Facts?”
“I don’t need no steeking facts!”
Jay C
Which to the wingnuts, of course, a la Obama’s Tucson Address. was taken as an imperative, rather than a mere descriptive…..