Well, talk about having some fun. I participate in The Ornery American, part of which is a discussion forum set up by the author Orson Scott Card, where social issues are bantered over at length by people of many stripes. A very interesting discussion area, though sometimes it is better for writing practice and honing debating skills, as one side rarely changes the minds of the other on any specific issue.

Anyway, someone brought up George Bush and his past with drinking and drugs. Now, I have already written extensively on this at this site (much of it mirrored over at The Expat), so I decided that instead of reinventing the wheel, I would cobble together bits and pieces from previous blog posts, and stitch them together into one large entry on Bush’s character and Judgment in a post on Ornery. Which is what I did. I mean, what the heck, they’re my words and this is not an academic paper I was writing, just disseminating information.

One of the guys from the other side of the Bush-is-a-weasel issue then Googled some of the text I had written–and found it, of course, on my blogs. Then accused me of plagiarism! Although he did not use those precise words, he did say that I was being warned (an “ALL CAPS WARNING” no less), and then tut-tutted, saying “Deliberate dishonesty indeed.”

Of course, he fell victim to the Internet Age fact that anyone can publish, and apparently just figured that the guy he was debating couldn’t possibly be the author of the sites he’d found on Google. Despite the fact that, with every one of my posts, my handle on the Ornery forums (“Tokyo”) listed at the top of each entry serves as a link to my profile, which clearly lists this blog as my own. So, he was a little observant, but not quite enough, and was clearly way too eager to jump the gun and attack me on grounds other than that President George W. Bush has abysmal character and judgment. Still, an amusing little incident there–especially since this same guy admonished me a few weeks ago for the unthinkable transgression of posting four messages in a row. Apparently he has assigned himself hall monitor.

In other news, the damage done by Bush’s crass use of NASA as a campaign tool is beginning to show. NASA has canceled shuttle maintenance for the splendid and prolific Hubble Space Telescope because Bush’s orders leave them little if any money for other missions (Bush didn’t give NASA much new money, he mostly stole all the money from other projects). As a result, the grand old Hubble–a great success and a testament to NASA’s can-do ability–will gradually fall into disrepair and then eventually die.

Swell.