White House aide caught red-handed plagiarizing

This is rich.

White House special assistant Timothy Goeglein, director of the Office of Public Liaison, wrote a guest editorial in July on the 100th birthday of John Wayne for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.

It begins with this well-crafted and stirring paragraph:

If we could scale down the pantheon of 20th Century actors to those with screen personas so resonant that their images remain available via plaster busts and lamps still sold in novelty stores decades after their deaths, John Wayne, whose centenary is this year, shares that particular down-market upper-tier.

Which is beautifully written, except someone else deserves credit for it.

Here is the lead paragraph of a piece written by Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun on June 20, 2007:

If we can scale down the pantheon of 20th-century actors to those with screen personas so resonant that their images remain available via plaster busts and lamps still sold in novelty stores decades after their deaths, John Wayne, the subject of a centenary exhibition of films starting today at the Museum of Modern art, shares that particular down-market upper tier with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean alone.

Well, Goeglein did change a few words.

Here's the second paragraph of Geoglein's piece:

Wayne's big-hearted, tough-guy screen personality was just as much a creation as a few others, but the boy who was born Marion Michael Morrison in Iowa 100 years ago, was seeking validation that did not exist in his disturbing home life when he was growing up. It was on to California from the Midwest, where a Glendale fireman dubbed him “Little Duke,” a nickname that he gratefully accepted. The name stuck, and it gave the broad-shouldered, 6-foot-4 inch man of stature even more prowess on the USC Trojans football team. Watching him play college football during the 1920s was cowboy star Tom Mix, who introduced Wayne formally to Hollywood. The legend would soon begin.

And the second paragraph of Bennett's:

Wayne's big-hearted, tough-guy screen persona was just as much a creation as Dean's tortured eternal adolescent and Monroe's breathless innocent sex pot. And like those two, Wayne's future persona was a natural reaction to a less-than-ideal childhood. He was born Marion Michael Morrison in Iowa 100 years ago. His father was a good-natured but heavy-drinking pharmacist married to a hot-tempered Irish wife who doted on a younger son, Robert, whom she had not seen fit to socially handicap with the name Marion.

I guess Goeglein must have figured he could use someone else's story as a template for his own  -- as long as you change some words here and there, add a few phrases of your own. Voila! Aparently, he didn't realize that plagiarism is a lot harder to get away with in this Era of Google.

But wait.

Seems like this isn't the only time this Bush Administration lackey has taken a short cut.

He also acknowledges he plagiarizedan essay by a Dartmouth professor:

"It is true," Tim Goeglein wrote to The Journal Gazette in an email. "I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses."

He said he wrote to the author of the essay, Jeffrey Hart "to apologize, and do so categorically and without exception."

Nancy Nall, a former News-Sentinel columnist who writes a blog from her home in Michigan, detailed the nearly word-for-word similarities of eight paragraphs of Goeglein's 16-pargraph essay about college education, which appeared in the News-Sentinel Thursday, and Hart's column, which was written about a decade ago.

The folks at the News-Sentinel are not happy.

Timothy S. Goeglein, former Fort Wayne resident and now a special assistant to President George Bush, has been accused of plagiarism over a guest column about education The News-Sentinel published on our editorial page on Thursday.

Goeglein has admitted that portions of the column were used from another source without attribution. He has apologized to the editors of The News-Sentinel and also said there may be other previous columns he has written for The News-Sentinel that also may contain plagiarized material. We have found material in at least two other previous guest columns lifted from other sources without attribution and are continuing to check other previous submissions.

It is The News-Sentinel's policy that all writers attribute sources of the information they use for publication. Guest columns are not solicited by The News-Sentinel nor paid. As with letters to the editor, they are submissions from the public, used at the discretion of our newspaper and reflect the opinion of the writers and not necessarily of The News-Sentinel.

The News-Sentinel will report further on this in Saturday's newspaper and online. We will not publish writings by Goeglein in the future.

Hmmm. Looks like they are going back and check everything Mr. Goeglein has ever written for the paper to see what else he's lifted.

He's lost his stint at the paper. Suppose he'll lose his day job at the White House?