Most of us are used to a certain level of crackpottery over at the Huffington Post, where many of the bloggers are, to put it lightly, possessed of some silly political ideas: Cindy Sheehan ranting about the Bush junta, b-list celebrities lecturing on conservationist toilet paper use, etc. Plagiarism can now be added to this list.

The current issue of Azure (for which I am an editor), features a piece by Jamie Kirchick on the decline of post-Aparthied South Africa, an essay that was reprinted by the Wall St. Journal’s OpinionJournal. Six days ago, a HuffPo blogger named Henning Andre Sogaard posted a piece on the same subject that reads like an op-ed length version of Jamie’s Azure essay — and in many places it is literally a line-for-line bootleg.

Here are two examples among many:

Kirchick: Last September, not long after the Israeli-Hezbollah war, South Africa’s minister of intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils, praised the Islamist group committed to Israel’s destruction. The Iran News Agency, albeit prone to exaggeration, reported that Kasrils “lauded [the] great victories of the Lebanese Hezbollah against the Zionist forces.”
Sogaard: Last September, not long after the Israeli-Hezbollah war, South Africa’s minister of intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils, praised the Islamist group committed to Israel’s destruction, reportedly “lauding” the “great victories of the Lebanese Hezbollah against the Zionist forces.”
Kirchick: Considering the conditions in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe (where democracy activists are imprisoned, tortured, and killed, opposition rallies are banned, and the free media are largely silenced), the comparison to apartheid-era South Africa is hardly hyperbolic.
Sogard: Considering the conditions in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe where democracy activists are imprisoned, tortured and killed, opposition rallies banned, and the free media silenced, a comparison to apartheid-era South Africa is hardly hyperbolic.

One would think that such blatant, undisguised plagiarism would require little by way of investigation before the removal of the offending piece, the firing of its author, and, if the HuffPo gang is feeling magnanimous, perhaps a word of contrition to the offended parties. But it’s been three days since the HuffPo was made aware of the plagiarist in its midst, and despite promises to the contrary it appears that little is going to be done about it — the offending piece is still online and unannotated. One would hope that the HuffPo could enforce the basic standards of journalistic ethics more rigorously than it enforces, say, the intellectual seriousness of the commentary that it publishes, but apparently that’s not the case.

UPDATE: Shortly after the above was posted, the offending HuffPo piece was removed, although the comments thread survives. The Corner – it gets results.