Talk About Great Timing

Malcolm Gladwell wonders aloud in the New Yorker if maybe we worry too much about plagiarism, and then a freelance writer sues Kitty Kelley for allegedly ripping off this article about just what George W. Bush was doing in Alabama back in '72. I have to say, the excerpts the Times runs for comparison are reasonably damning; when Kelley doesn't even bother to clean up the misplaced comma in one of Glynn Wilson's sentences before sticking it in The Bushes, you know something fishy's going on.

Although it's amusing to see NYT refer to Kelley's latest tome as "a hit book on the Bushes." It's not inconsistent with their critical take; Michiko Kakutani called it "catty," after all, while Ted Widmer told Review readers that the Bush family "deserves her kind of royal treatment." But it's still an amusing headline.