Well, Andy Breitbart dropped dead last night. Okay, actually it was after midnight so it was early this morning. I have absolutely nothing to say about that except to you morons who are announcing "well, that's three." Yes, things happen in groups of three, as a rule but no way to I put Breitbart in the same class as Davy Jones or Whitney Houston. The substance abusing Ms. Houston had more integrity while at the depths of her addiction than Brietbart had.
Now I don't really care so much if you want to be a right wing nut job, it's your life, go ahead on. I'm not and I will argue with you but that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about. I'm not even thinking so much about what Brietbart said about Ted Kennedy upon the latter's death, which was, um, well, I can't find the word. It was worse than disgusting, worse than heinous. Seriously. Unless, of course, you're a right wing nut job yourself, in which case you probably thought that calling the late Senator a motherfucker was the height of intellectual eulogies.
No, I care about what he did to Shirley Sherrod. I care because the guy sat there with an X-Acto knife and deliberately and maliciously took a very long piece of video, pulled out a phrase here and another phrase there, spliced them together in an entirely different order and then posted it as factual, because, after all, there WAS tape of her saying all that stuff. Well, Ms. Sherrod got fired because Breitbart said she was racist and wouldn't hire whites. My hunch is that she wouldn't hire idiots but that's another story. Then it came out that my cat looked at the original tape and figured out what he had done, Ms. Sherrod got offered another job and she's suing Breitbart. Or, more accurately, his estate.
I'm not saying anything (much) about Breitbart, he was a waste of bandwidth and that's it for me. But it brings me to plagiarism. I get plagiarized occasionally and I don't know why, I'm guessing it's because I remember to run spell check every now and then, thus making me appear erudite and informed when what I actually am is educated and opinionated. Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery but, frankly, I find it as annoying as hell. I thought about something, and I typed it and then I read it over and then I read it over again and I spell checked it and then I changed a word or two and then I sent it out into the world, only to find out that someone else copied and pasted it into their own discussion board. I thought "Hey. Do your own damn work" and turned him in. No, I was not that cavalier about it and I almost let it go. I thought about if for a day, I so hate to be a squealer. Looks bad. Well, I decided to pretend that I didn't know I was being plagiarized and say maybe the guy was unclear on the concept of quoting someone and he needed some technical help and the next thing I knew he was off of the class roster. Kind of felt bad but then I thought, okay, if nothing else he needed to know how to rip someone off and not get nailed for it.
Let's face it, there are only so many opinions and sides to a story.
It got me thinking about the time I was on a discussion board and some right wing gay nut job was claiming that gays should stay in closets or something equally ludicrous and I said something along the lines of "well, you're an idiot." Okay, it wasn't that but you get my drift. So the guy basically decided to call me a poopyhead and does so by using the quote function provided by v Bulletin and every message board known to man including those in countries that don't have Internet uses v Bulletin software and he quotes j"wello, you're an idiot" and says I said it, which I stand by, because he IS an idiot. Except that, instead of it saying "well, you're an idiot" it now says "well, you're a god among men" and then he puts my name on the quote.
Oddly enough, when I complained, the moderator told me that there wasn't anything wrong with that.
What is that called? It's not slander, or libel and it's not really plagiarism because he didn't cut and copy what I wrote and claim it for his own. It needs a definitive name. "Mis-quote" doesn't really have a lot of punch and I'm not sure it's prosecutable. After all, the moderator says it's okay. Of course, it's okay if the moderator doesn't like you because you and your husband have been married for a million years and you didn't break up his former relationship with his live in girlfriend and then continue to hang out with her as if you were all friends and your kids aren't in rehab, but I digress....
I know. Maybe we should call it a "Brietbart."
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