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Two weeks ago, I hit a doggie landmine while I was out walking my own pooch (complete with my in-the-city necessity for clean living: plenty o’ poop bags). It took me three solid days to get that crap out of the treads of my sneaker.

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about. Everyone’s all a-twitter about Obama and plagiarism today: is it a big deal, or is it a desperate move by desperate Clintons? And either way, will it stick?

I don’t know if it’s a big deal and I don’t care; both of these candidates are just show ponies to me and I’ll be looking to the Congress to step up to its own burst of productivity whoever takes the White House. (Rots o’ ruck.) But it’s sticky, alright. Trust me, I know.

As a former Biden Blogger, I can tell you that a day hardly went by when one of us didn’t get the knee-jerk “plagiarist!” attack in some blog post somewhere (most often on DailyKos, where a bunch of self-proclaimed filters of all that is truly progressive didn’t give Biden a moment’s rest until the whole Pakistan prediction started coming true). We knocked it down time and again with the truth, but that hardly ever mattered. A one-word smear label is easy, it’s memorable, and it goes to the core of politics: it’s about trust.

For the record, the truth is that Biden’s alleged plagiarism was nothing but one failed attribution out of many quotations. Let me plagiarize WikiPedia here:

Though Biden had correctly credited the original author in all speeches but one, the one where he failed to make mention of the originator was caught on video. In the video Biden is filmed repeating a stump speech by Kinnock, with only minor modifications. “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife . . . is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? . . . Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.” After Biden withdrew from the race it was learned that he had correctly credited Kinnock on all other occasions. He failed to do so, however, in the Iowa speech that was recorded and distributed to reporters (with a parallel video of Kinnock) by aides to Michael Dukakis, the eventual nominee. Dukakis fired John Sasso, his campaign manager and long-time Chief of Staff, but Biden’s campaign could not recover.

For comparison to Kinnock’s original, see European Voice:

The silver-tongued Welshman aired a TV advert the previous year in which he asked: “Why am I the first Kinnock in 1,000 generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Was it because they were weak, those people who could work eight hours underground and come up and play football, weak? … It was because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”

Kinnock never held the incident against Biden (the two met in London the following year and joked about it) and, in the intervening years, the transgression has come to seem almost quaintly insignificant.

The similarity in the purpose, context and overlap of the Biden-Kinnock episode to the Obama-Patrick episode is overwhelming; see for yourself. There are two differences here that you might argue cancel each other out: Obama and Patrick are friends, so he can reasonably say he had permission to basically repeat stump language; but Biden, all but once, actually cited the source of his language. Other than that, I say apples and apples, despite that fact that plenty of the meme-repeating Biden bashers keep parroting the same old crap on Twitter as they flock to Obama’s defense.

Naturally, since I didn’t think it mattered a hoot to the kind of man I believe Biden is, and what kind of president he could have been, I probably shouldn’t give a hoot about Obama having done the same stupid — minor, but stupid as hell in this cutthroat game — thing.

Biden did it 20 years ago, and I spent many, many days in 2007 still putting out the fires. Trust me, it sticks.

And then you have the media. There’s only one thing the media loves to do more than tell The Great American Story — a passion that Jeff Jarvis has been accusing of creating a veritable MediObama lovefest for quite some time. And that thing is to tell The Great American Story so that they can build, build, build up a candidate only to tear it all down again, like a child who gleefully crashes through the biggest castle of blocks he spent all day stacking. They spent the first 9 months of 2007 telling us that Hillary Clinton Is Inevitable. Inevitable, that is, until she “stumbled” in a debate answer about drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens. Then the story was Stumble! Stumble! Stumble! Inevitable No More??? twenty-four-seven. The blood was in the water and the sharks were feeding, and like frenzied sharks, it didn’t matter that they were eating one of their own [creations].

Why should we expect anything any more intelligent from the MSM tonight? This story has buzz, and they’re going to ride it like [obscene metaphor]. Turn on CNN when you get home tonight and count how many times you hear the word “plagiarism.” Grift, you’re a gambling man, what would you say the over-under is?