Well, it's been well over 2 years since I've written a diary here. Unlike back then, I am now a blogger - albeit with a different focus than politics. I write a humor/food blog called So Good where I have posted about what I think is an amusing intersection of politics and food.
The diary that follows is based off my original blog post on this subject. So what has prompted me to write my first diary in years? Well a plagiarism scandal of course! And involving food and recipes of all things!
David Weiner, over at Huffington Post, breaks the news that many of the recipes listed on the "Cindy’s Recipes" page on John McCain’s campaign site (and listed under the header "McCain Family Recipes") are lifted, word-for-word, from the Food Network website.
Weiner's Huffington Post piece reports:
This past Sunday, Lauren Handel, an eagle-eyed attorney from New York, was searching for a specific recipe from Giada DeLaurentis, a chef on the Food Network. Yet whenever she Googled the different ingredients in the recipe, the oddest thing happened: not only did the Food Network's site come up, as expected, but so did John McCain's campaign site.
On a section of McCain's site called "Cindy's Recipes," you can find seven recipes attributed to Cindy McCain, each with the heading "McCain Family Recipe." Ms. Handel quickly realized that some of the "McCain Family Recipes," were in fact, word-for-word copies of recipes on the Food Network site.
Now, recipes for foods are pretty similar, no matter who is making them. That’s why it is so odd that she would try and pass these recipes off as her own. If she had just listed these recipes or dishes as "Cindy’s Favorites" instead of "Cindy’s Recipes" there wouldn’t be an issue. Or even if they were listed under "Cindy’s Recipes" the campaign could have just cited Food Network as the source.
Serious Eats reports that the McCain website has already taken the recipes down. But who in the age of Google, Google Cache, and bloggers with free time isn’t aware of how easy it is to get caught lifting stuff word for word?
Check out one of the identical, and I mean WORD FOR WORD identical recipes listed on the McCain campaign website (originally grabbed from the Huffington Post piece, I reposted on Flickr):
The question now is, why do something like this? Lazinesses by a staffer? Or is there actually some political strategy involved? Does Cindy McCain think she needs to prove herself as adequately domestic? Is it really that important to proclaim that she has her own recipes for things? Is it that awful to just admit she uses recipes out of a book or off a website like most of America probably does?
This piece of information may have just swung my vote against John McCain for good. I’ll admit that I am terrified of his fiery dedication to pre-emptive war as a foreign policy tool that could lead to thousands more American deaths...but that fact was just making me LEAN against voting for him. But now we find out he has a wife who plagiarizes recipes? Yikes. I can’t possibly vote for the man now.