Where Have All My Heroes Gone?

National Public Radio commentator Daniel Schorr used to be my hero. Throughout the Watergate scandal, Tricky Dick Nix  had the temerity to add him to that historical honor roll Nixon called his "enemies list". Since then, Mr. Schorr's political insight has been an inspiration, and his commentaries were (and actually still are) something I look forward to hearing every week.

So you can imagine how surprised and dismayed I was to hear him stoop so low as to plagerize my remarks without attribution.

Here's my beef: a few years ago, when the Iraq debacle was heating up, I sent an email to NPR comparing Baby Bush's folly to an old joke I once heard. Although I will be the first to admit that it was not original, nevertheless, I would have thought that he would say how he was reminded of it.

What I wrote was something like this: Bush's going into Iraq to find the terrorists who attacked our country on 9/11 reminds me of a joke I once heard, where one night, a guy comes upon his friend crawling about on his hands and knees, searching for something on the sidewalk. He is under a streetlight. When his friend asked him what he was looking for, he said "I dropped a fifty-cent piece around the corner". "Well why are you looking for it here?", his friend asked. "Because there's more light over here!" was the terse reply.

I was, of course, alluding to the fact that none of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi, and aside from his feeble incursion into Afghanistan, there was no mention at all of the Saudi Arabians or Egyptians who were the actual perpetrators.

However, instead of giving me credit, he began his radio commentary by saying "I'm reminded of the old joke where..." rather than saying "A listener reminded me of the old joke where..." 

Now I am not one to squabble over small matters, and it could even be that someone on his staff just handed him an edited version of my email without giving him the source- but this came at a time when Mike Barnacle and other journalists were under the gun for their own problems with plagiarism, and I thought it somewhat hypocritical of him to lambast them.

So if you're reading this, Danny Boy, please be honest enough in future to at least let everyone know how you were "reminded" of some of your stories. Unlike our illustrious president, I still believe you are capable of original thinking.