Suppose a Democratic strategist wrote an open letter to colleagues and clients analyzing this week’s election returns. “Republicans have very little to cheer about this election,” he said with some satisfaction. “But off-year elections are rarely harbingers of future performance. Democrats actually did quite well in 2003, to little effect in 2004.”

Suppose further that the Democratic strategist signed his name to the letter and distributed it widely.

And then suppose one more thing: that the Democratic strategist had not actually written those words but had lifted them wholesale from a liberal blog. (In fact, those words do come from such a site, the influential dailykos.com.)

Might anyone suggest that the strategist had, uh, stolen those phrases? That he had committed plagiarism?

Change a few details and something very similar is going on now involving not a Democratic strategist but a member of Congress, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

This week the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Brown, a challenger for the seat of Ohio Republican Sen. Mike DeWine, sent a letter to DeWine criticizing Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.

The problem with the letter, according to the Plain Dealer, was that it was copied almost verbatim from talking points posted on a left-wing blog.

For example, according to the paper, blogger Nathan Newman wrote on Nov. 1: “What is striking about Alito is that he is so hostile even to the basic rights of workers to have a day in court, much less interpreting the law in their favor.”

In his letter to DeWine, Sherrod wrote: “What is striking about Alito is that he is so hostile even to the basic rights of workers to have a day in court, not to mention interpreting the law against them.”

Beyond that, the paper reported that “Brown’s letter cited details of 13 rulings by Alito, who in early 2006 will face confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The problem is, Brown’s descriptions in 12 of the cases were almost verbatim to what Newman wrote on his blog.”

So. A pretty clear case of plagiarism, right?

The answer is yes. Perhaps not the worst sort — after all, Brown’s letter was the sort of talking-points boilerplate that is seen on both sides of the aisle — but it did involve lifting material straight from an uncredited source.

Now, one might expect the liberal blogo-sphere to be at least slightly miffed to see a politician appropriating the remarks of one of their own.

Not at all. Instead, liberal bloggers — including the one whose work had been plagiarized — leaped to their fellow Democrat Sherrod’s defense.

“So a Sherrod Brown staffer used some lines from one of my blog posts,” wrote Newman. “Who frigging cares?”

The same held true at the Daily Kos. “Some dumbass reporter [for the Plain Dealer] accuses the Sherrod Brown campaign of plagiarizing Nathan Newman’s research on Alito’s labor record,” site founder Markos Moulitsas wrote. “While some bloggers obsess over copyright and getting ‘credit’ and shit like that, most of us are simply happy when our ideas and arguments gain wider currency.”

Even more striking was the opinion of the popular blogger known as Atrios, who in real life is Duncan B. Black, a senior fellow at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.

One might think that a media watchdog would be sensitive to such matters — after all, Media Matters was pretty hard on the disgraced reporter Jeff Gannon for, among other journalistic misdeeds, reprinting Republican National Committee talking points verbatim under his own name.

But the Brown letter was OK by Duncan Black. “Genuine plagiarism in this context is lifting out paragraphs of unique prose,” he wrote, “not culling some information from a blog post.”

On the other side of the argument, there were some, mostly conservatives, who pointed out that plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as your own, and the Brown letter seemed to fit that definition.

And there was, of course, the partisan argument: If a Republican had selectively lifted the words of a liberal blogger and presented them as his own in a political argument, would that be similarly OK with Newman, Moulitsas, Black and their allies?

The answer to that is no.

Now, this is not a capital offense. But politicians have been hit for plagiarism before — you might want to ask Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) about that.

And the fact that bloggers want their work to gain maximum exposure does not allow someone else to take their work and present it as his own.

In defending Brown, Moulitsas pointed out a disclaimer at the bottom of the Daily Kos: “Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified.”

That’s a good thing, because Moulitsas in no way approved the use of his words, attributed to a Democratic strategist, at the beginning of this column.

Surely he won’t mind.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it