By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--January 20, 2017
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Sections of her book are repeatedly lifted from articles by National Review author Andrew C. McCarthy, who is a friend of Crowley’s. Lines in her book also match word-for-word the work of other columnists, including National Review’s Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, conservative economist Stephen Moore, Karl Rove, and Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg View.
The FDR Keynesians’ defiance of the basic rules of economics led to such absurdities as the New Deal decision to pay farmers to burn their crops and slaughter their livestock to maintain high food prices.According to CNN, the above paragraph was lifted from an article commentator Steve Moore wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2011. Moore reportedly wrote:<
Over the years, this has led to some horrific blunders, such as the New Deal decision to pay farmers to burn crops and slaughter livestock to keep food prices high: To encourage food production, destroy it.Yes, there appears to be a regurgitation of the phrase “as the New Deal decision to pay farmers to burn crops and slaughter…” but how else could she have explained the New Deal era policy? Should she have elongated it along the lines of perhaps “as the New Deal era policy of providing subsidies to farmers to destroy crops and slaughter livestock mandated…”? There are only so many ways to explain paying farmers to destroy what they produce. It’s not as if she was stealing Moore’s unique intellectual property. She was explaining a concept economically as a good writer should. If she’d changed a word or two in the above phrase would that have let her off the hook in Kaczynski’s view? Don’t count on it. CNN refers to Crowley’s book in regards to pages 256 and 257:.
So much for not targeting the United States. Al-Badi, like the Iranian mullahs, went on to say that America was in irreversible decline and therefore ripe for jihad. In fact, the Brotherhood has always supported the use of violence when it would advance Islamism; it only tactically renounced violence against the Egyptian government because it knew Mubarak would have come down on them like a brick house and because they were advancing the Islamist agenda through the system anyway.CNN compares the sentences to something Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review in 2011:
As I have repeatedly pointed out — and as Barry Rubin argues in this excellent analysis of the new Obama policy — the Brotherhood has always favored violence where it would advance the Islamist cause; it tactically renounced violence against the Egyptian regime because it would have prompted ruinous retaliation from Mubarak and because the Brotherhood was making progress through the political process and influence over Egyptian institutions.Claiming the above example constitutes plagiarism is ridiculous. The concepts and some of the words overlap but the ideas expressed are not all the same. Crowley refers to Al-Badi and his assessment of America as a target; McCarthy doesn’t even mention Al-Badi or discuss the views he expressed. CNN produces a near-exact match when it refers to page 230 of Crowley’s book:
In December 2007 CIA director Michael Hayden stated that “of about 100 prisoners held to date in the CIA program, the enhanced techniques were used on about 30, and waterboarding used on just three.”The Wikipedia entry, CNN claimed is exactly the same except for a superfluous period at the end.
In December 2007 CIA director Michael Hayden stated that "of about 100 prisoners held to date in the CIA program, the enhanced techniques were used on about 30, and waterboarding used on just three.".Amazingly, some people consider copying from Wikipedia to be plagiarism. It is an open-source encyclopedia whose entries on controversial political matters are zealously guarded by social justice warriors who prefer “wikilawyering” and using their sheer numbers to prevail in edit wars. Copying from Wikipedia is often like writing down graffiti from bathroom stalls in nightclubs. No one knows if the graffiti is factually accurate or what the motives were of the vandal. For all we know someone may have set Crowley up, changing the article to match the wording she used in her book. If Crowley really did copy from Wikipedia, she shouldn’t have, but to call such a deed plagiarism is harsh. Most of CNN’s complaints are closer to the New Deal and Egyptian examples higher up in this article. Chu said that she “judged each item in context for what was appropriate, what was in error, the degree of error, and whether and how it needed be corrected,” and that she arrived at her “overall conclusions mindful of the totality.” In Chu’s opinion there were "relatively few examples of unsourced copying.” She added, “The term ‘plagiarism’ should not be used until errors reach a critical mass.” Some errors are to be expected in any lengthy work, she said. In other words, it isn’t plagiarism.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.