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Rien de Borchgrave

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.

Margaret Soltan, May 20, 2012 4:46AM
Posted in: plagiarism

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One Response to “Rien de Borchgrave”

  1. University Diaries » Arnaud de Screengrabe… Says:

    […] didn’t plagiarize after all (background here). Alex Pareene, in Salon, explains: The Unification Church and his think tank pay him money for […]

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