A faith-based plagiarist

Update: The original bust.

A longtime aide to President Bush who wrote occasional guest columns for his hometown newspaper resigned on Friday evening after admitting that he had repeatedly plagiarized from other writers. * * *

[Timothy] Goeglein, 44, is little known outside Washington. He is a familiar figure to conservatives and evangelical Christians, who knew him as a spokesman for Gary L. Bauer, the conservative who ran for president in 2000.

When Mr. Bauer dropped out of the race, Mr. Goeglein signed on with Mr. Bush, eventually becoming a top aide to Karl Rove, the chief political strategist. He was the eyes and ears of the White House in the world of religious conservatives and an emissary to that world for Mr. Rove and the president.

Source: The New York Times.

On the subject of plagiarism (a.k.a. "stealing"), a history instructor at Temple University offers some guidance to students with an example of acceptable paraphrasing using material from the novelist E.M. Forster. It just happens to be fortuitously à propos to the present circumstances:

In his analysis of the English character Forster carefully considers the indictment of England as "the island of hypocrites," a nation of Empire builders "with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets." Although admitting the essential truth of this charge, he finds his countrymen guilty not of conscious hypocrisy but of "unconscious deceit" or "muddle-headedness"—a quality which the public schools* have helped to develop.

For "England," simply substitute "the Bush administration."

* English public schools are the equivalent of U.S. private schools.