This Just In

[tartysuz]

LOLing at this hard. How do people think they can get away with plagarism -- or pretending you were at meetings that you clearly were not at -- in the age of the Internet? If you can find it to cut-and-paste, anyone can find it to out you as a plagarist and liar.



Ryan Grim writes in The Huffington Post:

When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn't getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises "gripping, never-before-heard detail" about the former president's key decisions, offering to bring readers "aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America's most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq," and other undisclosed and weighty locations.

Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir [my emphasis].

Comments

[kadymae.livejournal.com]

Heh. My favorite is the bookstore staff who are shelving this book in the "crime fiction" or "true crime" section of the store.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

Hee. I checked one of the big indie bookstores today and no one had moved it into true crime -- yet.

[daveroguesf.livejournal.com]

This is not, indeed, surprising.

I remember when they interviewed Martin Sheen about his encounters with Bush while making THE WEST WING - Sheen said that Bush could be characterized with a certain lack of intellectual curiosity.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

So Oliver Stone's W was a documentary, wasn't it?

[yourlibrarian]

Are we surprised? Just imagine what his college papers were like.

Then again, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney directed most of the events in the Bush years, so, you know, they can't really plagiarize themselves ;)

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

Is it a right wing plague? The premier of Alberta was caught plagiarizing almost half of a 13-page paper for a course he was taking via correspondence in 2004. Again, he (or his assistant) cut-and-pasted entire paragraphs from the Internet. They have no concept do they?

And yeah, Bush isn't doing anything differently than when he was in office: just reiterating the words of Cheney & Co. as if they were his own.