Am I the only one to notice that at the beginning of this campaign Barack sounded like Dave Chappelle imitating a white person and now he sounds like Martin Luther King? Is that perhaps a Hawaiian accent I’m discerning? I guess my real question is, are we voting for a President or an actor to play one? And so no one claims I’m biased, I asked the same question during Reagan’s tenure.
Some quick responses….
Dartmouth Review now says Hart piece was from ‘96. They also bring up the good point that “Civilization” is capitalized in both quotes. So now the onus seems to be more on Callahan. DR raises some possible theories for why Callahan cribbed the quote. Plausible, sure. But now it’s time for them (or someone else) to do some real MSM gumshoe journalism: actually CALL Callahan, Birzin and Hart and ASK them. They’re all prominent Dartmouth-ers and presumably the DR can find their phone numbers or at least emails. There may well be a reasonable explanation. But until one of the principles actually explains it, it’s still a mystery.
And this blog: Majikthise
….more later. Drinks are here.
You got to hand it to the Democratic elites. They’re not afraid to play the same card twice. Barak Obama is Bill Clinton of 92, no? Young, hip, almost, sort of black. What a scream watching the Clintons trying to hang on, kicking and yelling, refusing to pass on the baton.
In my ironic ramblings about plagiarism, it’s possible that I buried the lead. The Goeglein case was open and shut about as fast as you can get. But the question that lingers is what’s the story with this Jeffrey Hart character? I was just reading The Dartmouth Review’s wrap-up story by A.S. Erickson and something odd hit me:
When contacted by CNN, Professor Hart said, “I told him I was flattered he’d used it. It doesn’t damage him in my estimation at all. I’m glad he spread the word.” ….”A bit of plagiarism should not trouble this White House at all. The Dartmouth Review publishes a lot of very good material, and should take a bow.”
To his credit, this is exactly the point I was making in my last blog (though I meant it ironically). But honestly, why would an avowed Obama supporter like Hart be so forgiving of a Bush apparatchik like Goeglein? On a purely human level, it doesn’t make sense. He should be going ballistic. (for example, our friend Debbie Schlussel rightly takes considerable umbrage when Sean Hannity plagiarizes her)
The only explanation is that something was funny with his original story in the first place and he didn’t want to draw attention to it. He probably figured it was one part of one article - the whole thing would blow over. He had no idea at the time that Goeglein had also plagiarized everyone from The Washington Post to the Pope, and it would become a huge story. As I pointed out in my last blog, it could be that Hart had plagiarized the quote from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy from fellow Dartmouther Asst. Deputy Sec. of State Thomas Callahan.
On the other hand… One astute reader has pointed out that the Callahan piece was written by “Lisa Birzen, ‘03″. Giving her the benefit of the doubt that she wrote it as a freshman (apparently she was a math major who with “a passion for Japanese culture”), that would still be a year after Hart wrote his story (assuming the date on his story really was from 1998).
Did Birzen also plagiarize from Hart? Maybe, but her use of the Rosenstock-Huessy line (complete with the same misspelling that tripped up Hart and Goeglein) is in a first-person quote from Callahan that involves the memories of his father, who apparently had Rosenstock-Huessy as a professor sometime in the mid ’40’s.
“My father was class of 1947 at Dartmouth and used to quote to us one of his favorite professors, a philosophy professor named Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey: ‘The goal of education is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can refound his civilization.’”
That might imply that Callahan was sitting at his computer Googling old Dartmouth Reviews when he got called by Birzen and just completely made up a story about his own father. But why would a reputable member of Sec. of State Colin Powell’s team do that?
More likely is that Callahan - or his father - had written that quote somewhere else (maybe nowhere Googlable - maybe in some Dartmouth paper) and Hart had copped it. But let’s give Hart the benefit of the doubt, too. I just had my associate Eli send a note to the Dartmouth Review. They’re on the ground at Dartmouth and can dig through the records better than anyone to sort this out. (unless of course, they’re covering for Hart - who founded the Dartmouth Review in his living room - but again, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Odd, though, that Hart, whose tenure at Dartmouth may have overlapped Rosenstock-Huessy would have misspelled his name in two different places. I suppose that’s why he was an English professor, and not a spelling professor.)
Who knew there’d be so much intrigue at Dartmouth?
Meanwhile, other links to the Goeglein story:
The Opinion Mill
The Buzz Bin
Ivy Gate
Shakesville
Common Sense
In light of the recent news about a White House staffer caught copying the Dartmouth Review and other news sources for columns he wrote for his hometown paper in Indiana, I think it’s time to reconsider… what’s so bad about plagiarizing? And I’ve just discovered, is the initial article that was discovered to be “plagiarized” really one that was plargiarized itself?
Here was Tim Goeglein - this minor figure in the Bush Administration who was clearly still trying to impress his parents’ friends, his high school bullies and quite likely the girl who dumped him at senior prom. Once a month, he got his name in the second-rate newspaper in a two-paper small town with his one-line bio stating that he was a success in life: “Fort Wayne native Timothy S. Goeglein is a special assistant to President Bush in the White House.” But with a last name that homophonically cries out for someone to search his musings on Google, sure enough, former Fort Wayne News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall took 60 seconds to figure out that Goeglein had copped a decade-old piece in the Dartmouth Review for one of his columns.
So? How many people in Fort Wayne read the Dartmouth Review? This is the well-respected conservative student paper of Dartmouth College - a minor Ivy League school at best, but to be sure, one that even Tim did not attend. No, true to his conservative Christian roots, Tim attended the salt-of-the-earth Indiana University. He went on to work for Gary Bauer during the 2000 election, before becoming an acolyte of Karl Rove in the Bush White House.
I don’t know Tim well - our paths have crossed during a few campaigns and conferences over the years - but he always struck me as a genuine, earnest guy. A true believer, for whom it didn’t seem out of place that he wound up as President Bush’s liaison to Christian conservatives.
The real question is not why Tim cribbed a little on his columns. He’s a busy guy. Between Bush trying to burnish his legacy by giving away birth control to Africans, and with John McCain winning the Republican nomination largely out of spite, the White House liaison to the religious right has a LOT on his plate. No, the question is why the pointy-headed cynical Dartmouth crowd is heaving such a hue and cry over this homage from Tim? If they were genuine in their conservative ideals - like Tim is - they would care about promulgating the ideology, not preserving their egos.
Because really, that’s all plagiarizing is: Helping disseminate the ideas of another. Goeglein is accused of lifting a line from Dartmouth’s Jeffrey Hart, when he wrote in 1998: “A notable Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey often expressed the matter succinctly, ‘The goal of education,’ he would say, ‘is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.’”
Wait a minute, Tim still attributes the quote to Rosenstock-Huessy. (of course, Nancy Nall points out in Slate, both Goeglein and Hart completely misspell his name: it’s really Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy). It’s Hart who’s the one who’s egotistically cribbing the intellectual property of a hundred-year old professor. And what’s the lesson of this aged scholar? That a person should “re-found his civilization.” And, that is exactly what Goeglein did: He found an old Dartmouth Review story and then “re-found” it for a new audience in Indiana. I, for one, think that’s exactly what the old professor would have wanted.
Here’s the bombshell: A further Google search would imply that Hart plagiarized HIS quote from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Callahan - complete with the exact misspelling of Rosenstock-Huessy’s name. Callahan’s father is the original Dartmouth student who quoted his then post-World War II professor, Rosenstock-Huessy, a German intellectual who emigrated to US in 1933. Callahan, the younger, is a true Republican patriot - who’s served his country on the frontlines in Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan. Compare that to Dartmouth English teacher Hart, a founder of the Dartmouth Review who was a Nixon and Reagan speechwriter (he was likely fired by Nixon, or at best couldn’t hack it), and is now… get this… supporting Barack Obama.
Indeed, this whole controversy is indicative of the very faultline that is trembling the base of the Reagan Revolution. The cynical East Coast conservatives, who’ve cast their lot with McCain and give lip-service to the “conservative” ideology, versus the true-red Huckabeeans who would rather lose in November, than win with anything less than ten Antonin Scalia’s on the Surpreme Court.
In this context, I don’t see Tim as a plagiarist, but rather as a holdover from the Rovian days of the White House who is being purged for the final cleansing year of George W. If Karl Rove was still in the White House, Tim Goeglein would have been promoted, not fired.
