The Movie.

Maitre: Tragically, not well-connected enough.

“The oldest rule of thumb in journalism is quote the source and quote it accurately,” said Marvin Kalb, director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

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de Screengrabe: Happily, very well-connected!

“…[I]t comes to a certain point in [Arnaud de Borchgrave’s] life, I believe he’s 85, and he makes a mistake, you can be sure once he’s called out on it he’s not going to do it anymore,” [said Marvin Kalb].

Ironically, [Vladimir] Medinsky’s credentials as an historian were seriously questioned when it emerged early this year that his doctoral dissertation, “The Problem of Objectivity in Elucidating Russian History From the Second Half of the 15th through the 17th Centuries,” which he successfully defended in 2011, was extensively plagiarized. Medinsky has denied the charges, claiming that he simply used general phrases that happened to have been used by others, but a textual analysis posted on a Russian website for historians makes it clear that the plagiarism was substantial.

But then, of course, Medinsky’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, also lifted chunks of his doctoral thesis directly from other sources. According to Clifford Gaddy at the Brookings Institute, several pages of Putin’s dissertation, “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations,” which he completed at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997, were copied directly from the Russian translation of a 1978 business textbook written by two American professors. (It is common practice in Russia for officials to pay researchers to ghost-write their dissertations, so Putin and Medinsky might not have been aware of the plagiarism. But this of course puts them in even worse light.)

… didn’t plagiarize after all (background here). Alex Pareene, in Salon, explains:

The Unification Church and his think tank pay him money for little weekly columns that no one will ever read; he gets to pretend he is still an important journalist, and they get to be associated with a respected old man who has very powerful friends. [Arnaud] De Borchgrave is — understandably — confused as to why anyone would accuse him of plagiarism. He’s an award-winning D.C. fixture with a long and storied career, not some undergrad journalism major! Plagiarism is what unimportant people do. Friends of Marvin Kalb make minor attribution errors.

It’s exactly Roy Cohn’s explanation, in Angels in America, of why he’s not gay.

Roy Cohn: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. “Gay”, “homosexual”, “lesbian”; you think they tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn’t understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can’t get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?
Henry: No.
Roy Cohn: No. I have clout. Lots. I pick up that phone, dial 15 numbers, and guess who’s on the other end of the line? In under five minutes, Henry.
Henry: The President.
Roy Cohn: Better — his wife.
Henry: I’m impressed.
Roy Cohn: I don’t want you to be impressed, Henry — I want you to understand. This is not sophistry, and this is not hypocrisy. This is reality. I have sex with men; but, unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to Washington, and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.

It’s 5:15 AM, and just this moment the morning bird chorus started up. Catbirds, if mine ears don’t deceive me.

Strange plagiarism story developing here in UD‘s hometown, Washington, DC, involving one Arnaud de Borchgrave, a curious local figure, a sort of journalist, with the brains and charm of Donald Trump. Having grown up with this figure of fun, and having wondered all along why no one else seemed to notice his bogosity, UD isn’t surprised to find him at the center of a big text-theft scandal.

Plagiarists, serial plagiarists, are the ultimate empty suits, the nowhere men of the cosmos. Most plagiarize out of fear of their own incompetence; a select few (Germany’s von Googleberg is a good recent example) plagiarize because they’re demigods, too important to earn their by-lines and degrees in the way of mortals.

In this elite company lies de Borchgrave, who, like his religious counterpart, Richard Land, barks out his bombast without bothering to have written it.

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Update: de Borchgrave responds to multiple side-by-side examples with adorable insouciance:

If I dropped a few quote marks inadvertently, mea culpa. Everyone makes mistakes. I will make certain the appropriate quotation marks will be there in the future.

I cover it all the time on this blog, because it occurs all the time. The latest high-profile case: Romania’s brand new education minister. Apparently he lifted large chunks of other people’s scientific papers.

The scandal comes after the new Social-Democrat prime minister was forced to drop his first candidate for the education portfolio after she was accused of plagiarism.

Of course it’s doubly embarrassing because it’s the education minister. Triply embarrassing because the first candidate for the position has also been accused.

How to explain the pan-plagiarist movement across Europe? And China? And Korea?

etc.

Here’s one theory: America is an anti-intellectual country; in places like Romania, intellectuality has extremely high status. In the US, if you want to make a status statement, you will buy an expensive car; in Europe… well, in Europe you’re likely to do this as well… But you will be as anxious, if you’re European, to display a Ph.D. as you will a Porsche. With everyone scrambling to get advanced degrees, the temptation to cheat becomes huge.

Yes, we’ve got plenty of plagiarists here at home; but it’s beginning to look downright endemic in other parts of the world (I can’t keep up with the Chinese and Korean cases).

… but there’s one more in the clearly infinite line of plagiarizing German politicians – Florian Graf, Christian Democratic Union parliamentary leader, seems to have plagiarized his doctorate.

This is becoming so routine a story, so utterly predictable a series of events, that Graf has chosen to skip the traditional discovery-of-plagiarism steps —

1: Outright, outraged denial.

2: Insistence that whatever’s in the thesis, it was approved by a university committee, so any mistakes are the fault of the reviewing faculty.

3: Acknowledgment that one was very busy pursuing one’s political and family life while writing the thesis, so corners might have been cut.

4: Explanation that your work for the parliament (or wherever) doesn’t require a higher degree, so the whole thing is irrelevant.

5: Offer to rewrite the thesis.

6: In light of the university’s decision to review the thesis (the plagiarism was discovered by a website specializing in running theses through plagiarism-discovery software), a statement welcoming the review, since you are confident the thesis is absolutely fine.

7: In light of the university having discovered flagrant, blatant, omnipresent plagiarism, a statement that you are stepping down from your position.

— and has instead asked that his thesis be withdrawn. Perhaps he is hoping that this straightforward acceptance of the situation will play as dignified and reality-based, and his colleagues in the CDU will leave him alone.

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UD thanks Chris.

… (pronounced strip-tease) is a dance out of Germany. The steps are easy, and indeed the dance is popular all over Europe:

1. Plagiarize your thesis.

2. Be found to have plagiarized your thesis.

3. Be stripped of your thesis.

The latest high-profile strip-theses has been performed by (performed on?) Margarita Mathiopoulos, who

joins the ranks of German political figures to be stripped of their doctorates for cheating in their theses – a group infamously led by former Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg whose disgrace led to his resignation.

Plagiarism’s always funnier when moralizing scolds do it, and the joke doesn’t get any better than career copyist Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. His barking denunciations – via a radio show – of our degeneracy turn out, some of them, to have been lifted from other writers.

Usually a man of many words, Land has responded to the revelation of his immorality very very pithily.

“I apologize. And we’re going to move on.”

Nothing to see here! Move along!

But some are calling for his resignation. They seem to be embarrassed.

South Korea, a “plagiarizer’s paradise,” adheres to the very highest standards of plagiarism.

… goes to the University of Alaska, for refusing to talk about accusations of plagiarism against the dean of students, one of whose jobs was “enforcement of the university’s plagiarism policy.” The dean has just resigned, as it happens, and that’s the end of the matter.

More Hungarian laughs as President Dr. Pal Schmitt refuses to resign over having plagiarized 96% of his dissertation.

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UPDATE: So long, Pal.

UD thanks Edmund, a reader.

“I will prove that as a former Olympic champion I still have perseverance,” the 69-year-old Schmitt said. “I will prove … that I can write a so-called Ph.D. dissertation and obtain my doctorate in this manner.”

No-Quit Schmitt announces the next phase of his Embarrass-Hungary-to-Death project.

In Part I, Hungary’s president was cleared of plagiarizing his university thesis, even though he plagiarized his university thesis. Now the university that gave him a summa for his efforts is going to strip him of his degree, even though he didn’t do anything wrong.

Hungary’s Semmelweis University plans to strip the country’s president of his doctorate for plagiarism even though an investigative committee cleared him of wrongdoing, its rector said on Thursday.

At this rate the guy’s going to have to resign the presidency, even though he did absolutely nothing wrong.

The world press is doing its best to report the plagiarism that wasn’t plagiarism story. Sample headline:

HE COPIED, BUT HE’S NOT A PLAGIARIST

Hungary’s president has also “become a favored target of Internet users, who mock him with memes like Ph+D = (Ctrl+C) + (Ctrl+V).”