First, congratulations are in order. NN.C’s BFF Deb’s husband — are you following? — was the editor of one of the Pulitzer Prize winners announced yesterday. This one. So that’s good. Also, our virtual pal Gene Weingarten won for feature writing. I’m sure today’s regular chat will be something, if he can fit his head through the door.

This, however, is bad: The Seattle Times is cutting 200 positions, 49 in the newsroom. Part of me wants to see the end of the ink-on-paper newspaper, if only because I want to stop fearing the next thing and just see what the next thing is. (The other part doesn’t want to lose 65 percent of our household income, not to mention our health insurance, followed by our house and all of our possessions.) I keep thinking that once you take ink, paper, presses, Teamsters, gasoline, trucks and all the rest of those costs out of publishing, maybe the decreased ad revenue will cover a few meager salaries for those of us who provide content. Or maybe not.

The other day I took a left turn (oh, never mind how) and happened upon a porn blog. Immediately I was served a banner ad offering to hook me up with some hot babes in Grosse Pointe. Their adware had figured out a way to access my Zip code — fine with me, and not because I want to meet hot babes in Grosse Pointe. I want the newspaper industry to continue in one form or another, and needless to say, this does not happen when I land on the Free Press or News sites. Let’s check now and see who is advertising there. A bank and the lottery on the home page. A house ad — an ad for the paper itself, one that doesn’t return revenue, in other words — on the first inside page I visit. Elsewhere, not bloody much.

If a pornographer can figure out what Zip code I want to meet hot girls in, why can’t the newspaper ad staff figure out a way to sell a similar ad to a local bakery having a sale on muffins? Why doesn’t the ad say, “36 garage sales in Grosse Pointe this weekend! Search the listings by clicking here!” Just wondering.

Bossy is a humor/domestic-life blogger. I’d call her a latter-day Erma Bombeck, but I always hated it when people compared my column to Erma Bombeck’s, so I’ll just say she’s like a far, far hipper great-grandniece thrice removed from Erma Bombeck. She writes about home and family life and trying to get a decent haircut, and she knows intuitively how to write for the web, how to use photos and strikethroughs and different colors and styles of type to enhance the story she’s telling. Go ahead and poke through her archives if you don’t believe me. At the moment she’s on a road trip, one lap of America to meet her readership. And guess what? Somehow — she hasn’t revealed how — she got a car company to sponsor her. Yes way, as Bossy would say. Saturn is loaning her four — four! different! — hybrid vehicles to make her drive in. I don’t know if she has some agreement with them to feature the vehicles in any particular way; I will say that so far (she’s on vehicle No. 3, the Sky) what she’s written about the cars hasn’t seemed intrusive or product-placement-y. has been a little product placement-y, but at least in an amusing way. So my question for you today is, if Bossy, one little non-corporate blogger somewhere around Philadelphia, can figure out a way to get a major GM brand to give her four cars to drive around the country in, in return for the exposure they’ll get in her little non-corporate blog, why can’t the professional sales staffs of the nation’s newspapers figure out a way to rework their advertising the same way? I know at least part of the answer — accepting the loan of a car for a week for a road-tripping writer would taint their holy journalistic integrity — but that’s not the whole answer. At least some of the answer is: They don’t know how. If the people running newspapers had half a clue, one would have hired Bossy by now. They wouldn’t have her coming into the building, but they would have some sort of arrangement whereby they link to her blog, feature her on their site, and figure out some mutual back-scratching financial arrangement.

And Bossy is just a humor blog. Imagine what could happen if newspapers took the time to find independent partners in the rest of the community, the ones they have trouble penetrating anyway — ethnic groups, young people, enthusiasts of this and that. What if there were big, clickable badges on related newspaper pages, and a regular monitor to tell the paper’s readers, “Bossy has a great story today; be sure to check it out.”

As some of you know, I have a part-time job that requires me to spend a great deal of time visiting newspaper websites. I’m becoming intimately acquainted with all the ways I can be served ads on a website. Many of them are annoying. Some are clever. All are necessary. Most are rare. But I want to see local papers trying them all, and then some. I can’t think of the last time I had to pass through an ad screen (like you do at Salon, and several other big sites) at a Detroit newspaper, if I ever did.

But worse than all of this, newspaper journalists show few signs of “getting” the web; that is, they don’t know how to add links to their copy, or embedded photos, or even of adapting their prose style to a itchy-click-fingered readership. That’s because they’re not writing for the web, but for their main product, the ink-on-paper version. And it shows — in the columns that go on too long because they have to fill a hole, in the turgid writing that has to stay turgid so some old lady in Warren isn’t offended, and so on.

The Online Journalism Review put a provocative headline on this piece (It’s time for the newspaper industry to die) but all Robert Niles is arguing for is the death of the old ways of thinking. The meat of the piece is a discussion of comments on individual stories, an idea the industry has only recently adopted. Niles points out what has bugged me since it started — how quickly comments sections can veer off-topic, and into rantfests dominated by two or three posters with nothing better to do. (One of the things I marvel about on my own little blog is how good our comments are from day to day, how I can leave for a day to attend a funeral and come back to discover a lively discussion has broken out in my absence, and I just want to sit down and listen for a while.) Where are the monitors, the guides, or, failing that, the Slashdot-type rating systems that shove the irrelevant and annoying posters to the back of the queue? (I’ll tell you where: Doing three other people’s jobs. You might have heard that staffing is way down.)

Well, this is now officially a trainwreck of a post. We started out talking about advertising, and now we’re back to writing, which I persist in believing will save us, at least a little bit. I apologize. But everything is happening so fast now. A decline I thought would play out over 10 years is now down to three. Roy is only the ten millionth smart person to point out the obvious —

Despite all the grand claims made for the groovy blog revolution, the phenomenon is still basically parasitic. Few bloggers do primary reporting. Why should they? The doomed dinosaurs do it for them, and all the bloggers have to do is link to them, occasionally adding some variant of “I call bullshit.”

Were the Times to fold, and all the other big pubs to be drawn down into its maelstrom — a consummation devoutly wished by wingnuts everywhere — these bloggers would have nothing left to talk about except one another, and reports from large rightwing publications which would presumably, as honorary non-members of the MSM, survive.

— but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. Every day, I read someone online saying, “I cancelled my dead-tree paper because I don’t need it anymore. I read all my news online!” Well, good for you, then. Check back in a decade and tell me how that’s working for you.

Bloggage:

Once again, you can financially support the family of our late NN.C community member, Ashley Morris, here. If that makes you nervous, I’m sure Ash would appreciate a donation to a worthy New Orleans charity, perhaps Habitat for Humanity.

And to end on an amusing note, Improv Everywhere calls its latest stunt “Best Game Ever.” I agree; be sure to watch the video, which is tremendous. If you aren’t in tears by the time the Goodyear Blimp shows up, you aren’t human.

Well this was a Monday morning fit for the weekend it followed. I was in a bad mood for about 48 hours, entirely media-induced. I wish there was a way to check one’s hormone levels from day to day — gauges installed in the forehead, perhaps — so I’d know when to stay away from the papers.

It started Saturday with “This American Life” on Saturday, a particularly pungent episode called “The Audacity of Government.” (From the promo: “We’ve decided to spend an hour admitting and talking about the fact that everyone knows is true: America’s become a jerk.”) Part I was about the Bush administration’s attempt to buffalo an independent treaty commissioner, in order to enforce the “property rights” of a couple who built an illegal wall in their back yard, which backs up to the Canadian border. Part II was about the government’s relentless efforts to deport the immigrant widows of American citizens who died before their spouses’ permanent residency could be established — a group that numbers barely over 100.

It continued when I got home and read the story about this poor schmo, a former kindergarten teacher in his second trial for sexually assaulting two boys. It’s his second trial because his first conviction was overturned. The boys claim he grabbed them out of a lunch line and into an empty classroom and raped them both. Unfortunately, the classroom was never empty in the course of the day, and the kids showed all the signs of having been coached, and their stories changed with the wind. What happened? No one knows, but it’s highly likely the teacher on trial, practically the definition of a pencil-neck geek, didn’t do what he’s accused of. The jury has been deadlocked for a week, 11-1 for acquittal, but the holdout seems determined to hold out forever.

The funk lifted when he had our long-delayed dinner with friends Saturday. Main course: lamb chops. Mmm, lamb chops in the spring. Yum. But the next day, more outrages in the daily papers:

Remember when “vulgar” was a word everyone understood, and a description no one wanted to attract? Ah, those were the days:

Like so many of the over-the-top birthday parties that typically appear on “My Super Sweet 16” on MTV, Ariel’s celebration took the fairy-tale-princess theme to new heights.

Horse-drawn carriages delivered teenage guests to a faux-castle tent where they were met with dancing jesters and disco lights. The birthday girl, wearing a white dress and tiara, flew in via helicopter. And the evening ended with fireworks and the arrival of Ariel’s gift from her father: a brand new BMW 325i.

As viewers learned, Ariel’s dad was a successful oilman. “I love oil. Oil means shoes and cars and purses,” Ariel exclaimed to the camera as she and her father stomped around oil drilling sites in the muddy hills near her home in Campbellsville, Ky. When her father pointed to one of the sites and told viewers that it produced 120 barrels a day, Ariel asked, “How many Louis Vuittons is that?” Her father’s answer was “a bunch.”

Now there’s a lede that’ll keep you reading, even though you know what comes next: Ariel’s daddy is a swindler and thief, not to mention a man whose sense of restraint and decorum makes Tony Montana look like Prince Charles. Say what you want about WASPs, with their buttoned-down nerdiness and toothpaste tube squeezers and 25-cent tips for the yard man, but at least they don’t go around hiring choppers for their kid’s birthday party.

When the Obama administration sweeps into office, I look foward to seeing Ariel’s father face a firing squad. Ariel herself will be sent to a forced-labor camp for youthful offenders. ¡Viva la revolucion!.

Grumble, grumble. On to the Free Press and there was Mitch Albom, ever the edgy opinionator, going waaaay out on a limb to stake his claim that religious fanatics who shun doctors and sit idly by praying while their kids die of treatable diseases are — hold on to your hats — bad parents. But where is the qualifier? Ah yes, here it is:

Now I know there are many of us who believe “God has a plan.” And I hope and pray that’s true.

But I’m betting His plan doesn’t include us sitting around doing nothing.

Well-said, brave boy! My brother thinks picking on Mitch Albom is a waste of time. I heartily agree. And yet, I cannot stop.

Finally, in despair, I thought a little celebrity gossip might do me some good. Uh, no:

Madonna wants to remake “Casablanca,” set it in Iraq, and play the Ingrid Bergman role. Dr. Kevorkian on speed-dial for that one, baby.

So how was your weekend?

Oh, I shouldn’t complain. It wasn’t that bad. We got our drain cleared, the dog got his annual shots and an “excellent” from the vet, and as they say, who has anything to complain about, really? Not me. But I do still have some work to do, so that’s it for now.

C*nt is a terrible word and I don’t use it lightly. (I only play the asterisk game because it’s the first word in this post, and some people are still pretty shocked by it, Larry David or no Larry David.) I only deploy it for women who actively work to hurt, shame, blame and otherwise denigrate other women, particularly those who don’t deserve it.

But I think it applies here.

(And yes, it also applies to the women, and men, who book guests like this on wastes of time like the Today show, and continue to give them publicity.)

We got some more snow over the weekend, well within normal for March in Michigan — maybe three new inches. But Columbus, which by March is usually well into the mud/freezing rain/defrosting dog poo stage of winter, got a foot and a half, maybe more. My brother said it was so bad, he closed his bar. Then he called one of the TV stations, to get it added to the ever-lengthening closings list.

“Um,” she said. “Is this….an institution?”

“Hell yes it’s an institution,” he replied. “It’s a bar in Obetz! That’s like a church!”

“Sir,” she said. “I don’t think you’re being serious with me.”

Well, in a blizzard, all the serious is being hogged by people trying to drive.

I said last fall that I wanted lots of snow this winter, and I guess I got my wish. (As for our boating fortunes this year, in the god-I-hope-our-slip-isn’t-dry sense of things, I go for cautiously optimistic.) I’m still not really tired of winter yet. I miss my bicycle and the color green, but so much of coping with cold weather comes down to having the sense to wear a decent coat and boots. Still, there was a moment Saturday when I turned a corner and was hit in the face by a blast of wind, and thought: OK, enough. By week’s end the temperature should be nudging 50. That’ll do.

The student film is done. I left at the DVD-burning point, which was four hours into our last editing session. I’d recommend a class like this to anyone who likes movies, just so you can see what it takes to make even a very very small one. You’ll learn why “creative differences” are such a big factor in Hollywood. We spent an hour tweaking audio filters to get the right sound on a 30-second phone conversation, so that when we cut to one character while the other one was still talking, the voice would sound like it was coming through a telephone. There’s a strong tendency, at every step of the game, to say, “Screw it. This is good enough.” You need a few perfectionists in the room.

But here’s the best thing: This really is a creative outlet that is truly collaborative, and if you have the right collaboration, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. I’ll treasure the wonder I felt at every step of the process as our three-minute story came together. I also learned a thing or two about cheats for no-budget storytelling; one scene was lit by two hand-held flashlights. It was great fun, and I can’t wait to take the next class. And yes, I’ll post the video eventually, but please be gentle.

So, Monday-morning bloggage for you folks to fight about:

The qualifier, now an ongoing series: Mitch Albom spends 60 percent of his Sunday metro column outlining two cases of bad behavior caught on video and seen widely on the internet (the puppy-throwing soldiers and car-wash mom, for those of you who keep up with such things). Then…wait for it…the qualifier:

Now, I am not condoning either act — not the dog fling, not the hosing. Neither was smart or necessary. Both seem cold, cruel, even deplorable. But I wonder where we are going when every moment of every life is filmed.

The only thing that could make that passage better would be a “dare I say” inserted between “cruel” and “even deplorable.”

Another shoe drops in the Detroit text-message scandal. We are shocked, shocked to find it’s about more than sex. In fact, it’s about sweetheart deals and other glories of life in a corrupt city. By 2002, I was certainly aware that it was perfectly legal for my bosses to look at my company e-mail. (In fact, I often wondered if they were, and was sure to give them lots of juicy reading material.) What sort of moron sends stuff like this over a public (translation: where bosses = everyone) network?

In a message on Oct. 30, 2002, (mayoral chief of staff Christine) Beatty asked him how much she owed (mayoral friend and favored contractor) Bobby Ferguson for the driveway he poured at her Detroit home.

“Ya know ya my sister,” he replied. “Family don’t worry about shit like money.”

Finally, Laura Lippman’s new book, “Another Thing to Fall,” hits stores tomorrow. Run out and buy it and make the Lippman-Simon Co-Prosperity Sphere’s March 2008 one to remember. Plot synopsis: Lippman’s P.I., Tess Monaghan, investigates shenanigans on the set of a TV series filmed in Baltimore. No, not that one. (Which reminds me: Wire-blogging reaches its crescendo over at The New Package. Distracted as I was last week by my other life, your correspondent will check in…eventually. The new slackage!

OK, that’s it for me. I have a story to write, and have to readjust my head into money-making mode.

I swore I wouldn’t write another word about Tim Goeglein unless someone paid me for it, but this is too good not to note. Be not afraid, all is forgiven:

At the weekly meeting of center-right leaders at American for Tax Reform on Wednesday morning, he received three rounds of applause from the packed room, including one standing ovation, as he asked for their forgiveness.

I just knew he’d land on his feet. K Street, here he comes. A happy ending for everyone.

…twenty-seven:

Further investigation by The News-Sentinel has found evidence of plagiarism in seven more guest columns from former White House aide Timothy S. Goeglein.

With that, I’m closing comments on the previous Goeglein posts. This has now achieved wreck-on-the-freeway status, and I just don’t know what more there is to say.

Well, that was interesting.

The Goeglein story passed from the unlikely to the absurd in record time, but who knew there was another step to go, into the surreal? Tim Goeglein plagiarized… the Pope:

On April 6, 2005, Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times: “It was based in the belief that, as he (the Pope) once put it, ‘a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being’ was at the root of the mass movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism,”

In a column published Oct. 18, 2005, Goeglein wrote: “A degradation and pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being was at the root of the 20th century, the twin evils of communism and fascism.” No attribution is given to the Pope or to Cohen in the column.

That’s from my alma mater, The News-Sentinel, to which I take off my hat today. They took what was potentially a grievous embarrassment and made the best of it. The link above takes you to the main story, which has links to the sidebars, but this one — a simple list of the columns and their, er, source material — is the most interesting to me. They’re so strange:

“Foster Park preserves transcendent ideas of beauty that are coming back” – July 5, 2006; “A Wish Came True: An L.A. Museum Displays Klimt Paintings Taken by Nazis and Restored to Family,” by William Booth, Washington Post, April 5, 2006

Foster Park was at the end of my street in Fort Wayne. It’s a beautiful place, with gardens that every year serve as the backdrop for wedding and prom pictures. From the headline, I’d expect a paean to the clematis and tiger lilies. What it has to do with Klimt, Nazis or museums in Los Angeles, I’d like to know. It would be interesting to see the side-by-side on that one. Among others. All the others, actually.

But today I’m trying not to think about the political angle, or the media angle, or whether I’ll ever get to see what he stole from Ben Stein’s Diary, which could hardly be more specific to Ben Stein. Today, I’m trying to understand Tim Goeglein.

If Groucho Marx refused to join any club that would have him as a member, what would he make of a person so desperate to join a club he’d do the one thing that, if discovered, would get him banned from the club for life? Like most journalists, I’ve seen a few cases of plagiarism over the years. They all shared a common thread of desperation. Writers with drinking problems, marital problems, money problems, deadline problems — these were the people who copied and pasted. Some were good people who got in over their heads. Some were lazy. Others were so careless you could only think they wanted to get caught. (One cribbed ad copy from Newsweek magazine. Another, a theater critic leading a trip to/tour of Broadway, sent back reviews lifted from the New York dailies, if I recall correctly.) Anyway, just as in spotting an urban legend you look for the common thread of fear, in a case like this you try to find the desperation. My guess is, Goeglein did what he did to be thought intellectually substantial, a thinker, the sort of guy who can keep up with the Buckleys’ cocktail chatter. But what in the world would lead a young man with so much to lose to risk it all for such a small reward?

As has been noted by the editor of The News-Sentinel, these columns weren’t assignments. They weren’t solicited. There were no deadlines. He wasn’t even paid. Guest columns, in that paper, are offered by readers; basically, they’re somewhat beefier letters to the editor, almost entirely unremarkable. The head of the United Way thanks the community for its generosity, an old woman recalls the good old days, a Chamber of Commerce type encourages support for a worthwhile initiative — that sort of thing. Goeglein was on a pretty leisurely annual schedule of four or five until the last year, when they began appearing more often. I wonder what changed to make him pick up the pace. That’s a subject for his therapist, but I can’t help but note how dangerously close the pilfered pieces were to the originals in the last few years:

“That which has been and that which can never be” – June 6, 2007; “Wilder’s Ode to Mortality,” by Eric Ormsby, The New York Sun, May 16, 2007

“Honoring John Wayne’s centenary” – July 23, 2007; “100 Candles for the Duke,” by Bruce Bennett, The New York Sun, June 20, 2007.

Fort Wayne can sometimes seem like the end of the earth, but it does get internet service, and has lots of people who might read the New York Sun online and wonder why this piece in tonight’s paper sounds like something they’ve read before. A decade-old edition of the Dartmouth Review is one thing, but the New York Times is quite another. We’re either in Stop Me Before I Steal Again territory, or this is a man who simply thought he’d found the perfect place to satisfy his need to be an intellectual — a paper hardly anyone reads. (As an ex-employee, I sometimes suspected it myself.)

I keep thinking of the first of Goeglein’s columns that I really noticed. It was a few years ago, and it ran somewhere around the week between Christmas and New Year’s (and, as far as I can tell, it’s not on the pilfered list). In it, Tim announced that the coming year would be one of self-improvement for him; he would read “the canon,” great books that form the cornerstones of Western civilization. He wouldn’t have time for the entire canon, of course, but a decent survey, and he laid it out month by month, starting with the Greek philosophers, and so on — if it’s July, this must be Jane Austen. I read it and wondered why he was bothering, because he’d obviously made up his mind what to think of each one. I called a friend, an English teacher, and we had a few chuckles over it, but now I see I should have been thinking like a novelist and not looking for an easy laugh; the column seems, in hindsight, to say so much about the guy and his insecurities. Knowledge and erudition was something you could rub on like a salve; a reading list could be a Charles Atlas course so bullies would never kick sand in your face again. A better mind in 365 days, or your money back.

* * * * *

Enough amateur psychoanalysis. Two more things I have to say before this story gets stale:

One, while I appreciate all the compliments on my “reporting,” I cannot emphasize this enough: 75 percent of this story was dumb luck, 22 percent was Sergey and Larry, and I’ll claim the remaining three. Reporting is making phone calls, knocking on doors, conducting interviews and sifting through documents. From the minute I said, “What a strange name to drop; let’s see what Google turns up” to realizing what Goeglein’s column really was, the elapsed time was under 60 seconds. Drafting a post took about an hour. I let it marinate overnight, and to give my friends at the paper a little notice. This story wasn’t low-hanging fruit, it was fruit that smacks you in the forehead when you walk under the tree. The only reason it smacked me and not you was, it was in a part of the orchard people don’t visit very often. (As I said above: As an ex-employee, this is something I always feared.)

Two, I owe an apology to lots of good writers out there. Jonathan Yardley, from whom Tim swiped pieces of his essay on Hoagy Carmichael, which I was tough on, is one of my favorites. All I can say is to echo what a friend of mine said, one who’d looked at both the originals and the ripoffs: he’d developed his own hybrid prose style, what you kids might call a mashup.

With that, I leave any new visitors to discover my own sad truth, sure to reassert itself in the days to come: Most days, this blog is about perverts in the library, bitching about the weather and things you see around Detroit. Daily life, with links and comments — that’s what this blog is. Ah, you’ll figure it out soon enough. Thanks, you 25,000 additional visitors of the last couple days. And in case you were wondering about that new-media business model, Google giveth, but Google doesn’t necessarily giveth. Total Google AdSense revenues for Friday and Saturday, with all those eyeballs? One dollar and 21 cents. Stop by sometime, and I’ll buy you half a latte.

I feel bad about what I’m going to do here.

I’ve had a lot of fun at Tim Goeglein’s expense over the last few months. Mean-spirited fun, certainly, but my problem with him has always been one of personal taste. In his columns for The News-Sentinel, my old newspaper, he personifies a certain sort of apple-cheeked Hoosier drippiness, which undoubtedly masks a core of white-hot ambition. I mean, he worked at the right hand of Karl Rove, and remains in the White House. But while he works in the West Wing, he chooses to write awful, turgid essays on the wonders of Hoagy Carmichael, deceased operatic composers and his parents’ marriage. I know it’s unfair to expect policy analyses, but it’s maddening to think that here’s this guy, a home-towner, eyewitness to an epochal period in American history, and he gives us Odes to Summer. Why he chooses to do so for the failing paper in a two-newspaper town, one with a circulation that probably barely nudges 30,000 these days, remains a mystery. (I’ve heard theories: He does it for his mother, and He plans to run for office soon, and he’s raising his local profile. Don’t really care, anyway. He’s just fun to make fun of.

When William F. Buckley died this week, one of my first thoughts was that he’d been friends with Tim, and we would almost certainly have a long, overwrought, superlative-packed column coming down the pike soon, and we’d have ourselves a good time giggling over it. When I saw he had a piece in the paper Thursday, the day after Buckley died, I thought for a second the wait was over, then spotted the headline — Education: Ideas worth defending, honesty of reflective thought — and realized, no, this has been in the pipeline for a while.

Not that it was a total disappointment. I started to read, and a name jumped out at me — “Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey,” described as a “notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth.” Now, I’m sure Tim’s spare brain space isn’t cluttered, as mine is, with “American Idol,” the internet and what’s-for-dinner concerns. Certainly string quartets waft through his paneled study, where he reads and thinks under the mounted ibex head, far from the vulgar buzz of pop culture. Surely he can acquaint himself with notable professors of philosophy at Dartmouth while I watch the Oscars. But this name was so goofy, just for the hell of it, I Googled it. And look what I found.

Tim:

A notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College in the last century, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, expressed the matter succinctly. His wisdom is not only profound but also worth pondering in this new century. He said, “The goal of education is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.”

He meant that, I think, in quite a large sense. He did not mean that you had to master all the specialties you can think of, but rather to be an educated man or woman, you needed to be familiar with the large and indispensable components of our civilization.

This does not mean you should not study other cultures and civilizations. It does mean that to be a citizen of this one, you should be aware of what it is and where it — we — came from. It can hardly be challenged that the United States of America is part of the narrative of European history.

“What is a College Education?” by Jeffrey Hart, writing in the Dartmouth Review (cite is unclear, but from the URL it appears to be from 1998):

A notable Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey often expressed the matter succinctly, “The goal of education,” he would say, “is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.”

He meant that in quite large a sense. He did not mean that you had to master all the specialties you can think of.

He meant that you need to be familiar with the large and indispensable components of your — this — civilization.

This certainly does not mean that you should not study other cultures and civilizations. It does mean that to be a Citizen of this one you should be aware of what it is and where it came from.

It can scarcely be challenged that the United States is part of the narrative of European history.

My, my, my. Tim Goeglein, director of the White House office of public liaison, is a plagiarist.

Not an accidental or delicate one, either. The piece (Tim’s) goes on:

It can hardly be challenged that the United States of America is part of the narrative of European history. Europe is overwhelmingly the source, and some parts of Europe more than others: Our language, literature, legal tradition, political arrangements derive, demonstrably, from England. This Britain-America connection is central.

There have been many ways of answering the question: What is Europe? A handy way to think of the matter is the paradigm of “Athens” and “Jerusalem.” In this paradigm, those terms designate both the two cities we have all heard of but also two kinds of mind. The tradition designated “Athens” is associated with philosophy and with critical exercise of mind, with reason. The tradition associated with “Jerusalem” is associated with monotheism, with faith.

Hart:

It can scarcely be challenged that the United States is part of the narrative of European history. It owes little or nothing to Confucius or Laotse or to Chief Shaka or to the Aztecs. At the margin it owes a bit to the American Indians, but not a great deal — corn, tobacco, some legendary material. But Europe is overwhelmingly the source. And some parts of Europe more than others: Our language, legal tradition, political arrangements derive, and demonstrably so, from England.

There have been many ways of answering the question, “What is Europe?” But a handy way to think of the matter is the paradigm of “Athens” and “Jerusalem.” In this paradigm, those terms designate both the two cities we have all heard of, and also two kinds of mind.

The tradition designated “Athens” is associated with philosophy and with critical exercise of mind. The tradition associated with “Jerusalem” is associated with monotheism.

Note that Tim leaves out the gratuitous swipe at non-European cultures. Well, the original was written a few years ago, and times have changed. But other than a word here and there — Hart likes “scarcely,” while Tim goes for “hardly” — these two great minds think alike. A lot alike:

On the side of Athens, you would want to learn something about Homer, who in many ways laid the basis of Greek philosophy, and you would need to meet Plato, Aristotle, Socrates — the three greatest Greek philosophers — as well as the Greek dramatists, historians, architects and sculptors.

Over in Jerusalem, you would find the epic account of the career of monotheism as it worked its way out in history. The scriptures, like Homer, have their epic heroes — Moses most dramatically — and like the Greek tradition in some ways, they refine and internalize the epic virtues. Athens and Jerusalem, reason and faith, interact, and much flows from this interaction that results in the fullest expression of the educated man and woman.

The intellectually exciting thing is that with Athens and Jerusalem as the foundations, you would follow all of this down through the centuries, through Virgil (the great Roman poet), Augustine, Dante (who is perhaps the greatest poet of Western culture), Shakespeare (who is probably our greatest playwright), Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Voltaire, Goethe and on to modernity. “The best that has been thought and said,” as Matthew Arnold called it. The mind of Europe as T.S. Eliot put it, “from Homer to the present.”

That was Tim. This is Hart:

On the side of “Athens” you will want to learn something about Homer, who in many ways laid the basis of Greek philosophy, and you will need to meet Plato, Aristotle, the Greek dramatists, historians, architects and sculptors.

Over in “Jerusalem” you will find the epic account of the career of monotheism as it worked its way out in history. The scriptures like Homer, have their epic heroes, and, like the Greek tradition in some ways they refine and internalize the epic virtues. “Athens” and “Jerusalem” interact and much flows from the interaction.

You will follow all of this down through the centuries, through Virgil and Augustine, and Dante, in Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne, Moliere, Voltaire, Goethe and on to modernity. “The best that has been thought and said, “ as Matthew Arnold called it. The mind of Europe as T.S. Eliot put it, “from Homer to the present.”

Interestingly, Jeffrey Hart himself is quite the character, another aide to a president (Nixon, Reagan), a spiritual and intellectual brother to Tim. As for the Dartmouth Review, well, most people know the story of one of the first high-profile right-wing student publications, that gave an early-career boost to Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, among others. (Tim went to Indiana University.) All accounts paint a picture of a dedicated academic who, you’d think, would frown on one of academia’s most serious sins. I look forward to hearing his reaction, if any.

I mentioned at the top of this post that I feel bad about what I’m going to do here. (I stole that line, by the way; it’s Nora Ephron’s opening for her devastating profile of Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post. Now that I’ve given credit, it’s not plagiarism, it’s an homage. See how it works?) I feel bad because my old buddy Leo Morris, who edits the op-ed pages, is going to bear the brunt of this — the investigation, the uncomfortable announcement to readers, the search through the archives for more time bombs, the embarrassment of being took by someone any editor would trust, a self-styled intellectual and senior White House aide, for crying out loud. But either this stuff is important or it isn’t, and I say it is.

UPDATE: Thanks to the Kenosha Kid, in comments, who finds more evidence of unattributed sourcing, in the Hoagy Carmichael essay linked above. The rifled pockets were those of Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. Way to pick an obscure source, Tim.

UPDATE 2: Since we’re getting some outside linkage today, a word about comments: I have mine set for “first-timers go to moderation,” and after that, you’re in. So if you’re a newbie, feel free to comment, but if it doesn’t appear right away, don’t keep trying. I’ll stay close to my computer today, but I have to run a few errands today, too, and will be out.

UPDATE 3: Tim comes clean. Thanks, Natalie, for the tipoff.

UPDATE 4 (and it’s hardly noon yet): Thanks to commenters Adam Stanhope and Grytpype Thynne, who did the work on the operatic composers piece, down in the comments. (Click here to go there directly.) I am reminded of a recent scene from “The Wire”: “You think the first time he gets caught is the first time he does it?” Apparently not.

UPDATE 5: And MOOOOOOOORE.

UPDATE 6: OK, this is funny, the News-Sentinel’s response. The subhed should be, “Nall? Never heard of her.” Oh, and keep following our bird dogs, Adam Stanhope and Grytpype Thynne, in the comments. I can’t keep up any more and I have to step out for half an hour.

I know nobody cares about this stuff but me, but for some reason Because good, clear writing is the cornerstone of democracy and even human freedom itself, I keep scratching that itch about columnists qualifying their opinions. So I Googled the phrase “don’t get me wrong” in G-News — 2,517 results. Sixty-four hits on “‘i’m not saying’ AND ‘i am saying’.”

Go forth and write clearly, grasshopper. Say what you mean, and be brave.

(A small rant for the journalists in the room. The rest of you, go visit the LOL cats.)

Alan Mutter, who calls himself a Newsosaur, starts off our discussion with the proverbial “one wag” comment:

“How many people have to read a story before it goes in the paper?” asked a senior editor at a major metropolitan daily who is struggling to sustain the quality of his news report in an era of shrinking resources. “If we have to economize, the editing process is the place. Why do we have all these people processing stories after a reporter writes it? They are not producing anything that will get us traffic on the web.”

No, I guess they’re not. But they are saving your ass from getting it sued off. Also, from becoming a laughingstock. Also, from having your bargain-basement, straight-out-of-college reporting staff embarrass you in print by misspelling the mayor’s name. For starters.

When I read statements like this — As you can see from the chart* below, a half a dozen reasonably well compensated people – or more – are likely to lay hands on an ordinary story bound for the pages of the typical metropolitan daily — I always wonder what I did wrong. I’ve worked at two dailies, one large, one midsize that became small during my time there. First of all, we can quibble over “reasonably well compensated,” but we won’t. Half a dozen editors? On a good day, at full staff, for a Sunday front-page story, maybe. And where are these papers whose reporters can be trusted to put stuff in the paper without multiple layers of oversight?

* The chart has a typo. Snicker.

The following is the full text of a police story submitted to the metro desk at a major metropolitan daily, back when my one of my old pals worked there. (I had to go to the basement and go through old files to find it, so be grateful.)

A mad dog died and an East Side family was happy Monday night, police said.

A pit bull terrier had terrorized three girls and two women Sunday and forced the girls up on a kitchen table to flee from the animals snapping jaws, Anthony King, 30, of [address redacted] said Monday night.

King said the neighbors dog had lurked in the basement apparently ate some drano and charged up the back stairs and into their second floor kitchen Sunday.

An autopsy showed the dog was mistreated and suffered stomach lesions, King said.

“The growling, foaming, spitting, dog chased the kids up on the kitchen table, 5th District Sgt. Joseph Hoellar said.

Like author Stephen Kings Cujo the King family feared the dog was rabid.

“We were concered the dog was rapid, King said.

Family members tricked the dog to go into a locked room while the family waited for police.

The dog went into a final fatal frenzy and when the officers arrived the dog died, Hoellar said.

King praised police who calmed his screaming children.

“The really calmed down the kids and handled the situation nice. The police were so wonderful and handled the situation so nice we want to give them some recognition, King said.

King said his wife, Priscilla, his mother-in-law and his three daughters aged, 4, 5 and 11 fled from the mad dog.

The dog owner was in a hospital and the wife of the owner apologized to the family, King said.

King praised officers Charleen Branski and Timothy Oddsen,

The end. An isolated case, you say. Perhaps. (As I recall, the reporter didn’t last very long. But, I remind you, he was hired in the first place. He’s probably teaching middle-school English now.) This is what he wrote, typos, unclosed quotations, semiliterate sentence construction and all. This is what he turned in to his editors, his my-work-here-is-done statement. This.

Not all reporters are this bad. But more are than you might think. In my experience, the number who check spelling, style, grammar, facts or anything else dwindle by the day. Their mantra is: That’s the desk’s job. Alan had a sorta-intern once (he was on staff, but spent a summer in Features refreshing his creative batteries) who, after being assigned a story on mud-racing, turned in a set of notes. Seriously: A SET OF NOTES, transcribed. Random impressions, a few quotes, incomplete sentences. And he worked on this story for a month.

I could go on: I once edited a first-person column describing a lesson on firing an AK-47. The writer referred to the thing throughout as a “gun,” to the stock as “the wooden part at the back of the gun” and the forestock as “a wooden handle in front of the trigger,” etc. And, let me remind you, I was the third person to handle this story before it went into print. I can only imagine the letters we would have gotten. (As for me, I sent an e-mail to the reporter, sketching out the venerable Marine parade-ground chant.)

I could go on all day, but like the growling, foaming, spitting, dog, you might fear I was rapid.

Mutter’s post goes on to point out:

While it would be heretical at most major news organizations to “railroad” stories from a reporter’s keyboard directly into print, several publications, including a few surprisingly large ones, are allowing reporters to point, click and post words and images directly to the newspaper’s website. If the work is good enough to slap on the web without further human intervention, why isn’t it good enough to go directly on a web press?

I see what he’s saying, but he’s making the wrong argument. Anyone who’s spent time in a newsroom knows that half the people with “editor” in their job title don’t edit much at all. They’re in charge of thinking outside the box, long-range planning, going to meetings, organizing the redesign of the obit page. (Rumor has it that when the new Gannett sheriff arrived at the Detroit Free Press, he regarded one of these souls across the table at a meeting and said, “Tell me again what your job is?” There’s a wakeup call.) For my money, you could can one-third to one-half the designers at any given newspaper, but they may have different ideas. Anyway, my point is: You don’t take eyes off the copy, especially when you’re originating the copy. Editing is quality control, and quality is all we have.

OK, rant over. March along with me: This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun…