… 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.