Maybe the GOPTeamLeader.com site should add a product warning: “Caution: Use of form letters has been shown to result in public humiliation.”
The people who click to send those GOP form letters to their local paper are getting an unfair share of the blame and shame. The Republican National Committe is letting small town “Team Leaders” suffer for actions their website made possible and their “GOPoint” system encouraged.
For example, on the letters page of the Rutland (VT) Herald, an astute Web-watcher wrote this letter.
On Friday, Jan. 24, two letters to the editor appeared in perfect timing.
One of these letters was by Daniel Lahey, of Seattle, Wash., who said David
O’Grady’s letter of Jan. 15 was “the exact same letter published in newspapers
throughout the country.” The other letter was from David O’Grady and the
opening line of the O’Grady letter was “Senate Democrats’ didn’t listen
to the American people in November.”
Since Mr. Lahey said he discovered that the O’Grady letter was plagiarized
by doing a Google search on one sentence of the letter, I did the same with
the opening sentence from his Jan. 24 letter. The first site that came up
was the home page of the Vermont Republican party. The second was a letter
to the editor of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. With very few changes, O’Grady’s
text (which I assume was not really O’Grady’s text) was the same as the
text found in a Dogpile search.
Apparently David O’Grady is lacking a gift for original thought and is simply
disseminating GOP propaganda. Next time you “write” a letter to the editor,
Mr. O’Grady, why not supply the source and use quotation marks where they
apply? Or, better yet, leave the space in the Herald for someone who wants
to share their own ideas.
LOU MAGNANI
Wells