The tackiest accusation lodged in this campaign was the one by Hillary Clinton accusing Barack Obama of plagiarism. I have already posted about this indignity in "Plagiarism and Ghostwriters," and Jason Zengerle has uncovered a pattern of unacknowledged writing claimed to be Hillary's but written by others. Well, in this morning's Boston Globe letter section, a reader, David Stevens, writes, "On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, [Hillary] said, "You campaign on poetry, but you govern on prose." A clever line, and an elegant one, too. But it wasn't hers at all. "She borrowed [this] from Mario Cuomo...That exquisite maxim is in Bartlett's." Neither Cuomo nor Bartlett's got any credit.
Oh, what a fraud she is -- and a fraud who projects her fraudulence onto others, in this case Barack Obama. Maybe, I should concede that she might be competent, the competence of a robotic doll. The true problem with her -- as with her husband -- is character.