Those right-wing sleuths

-- by Dave

Clif at Sadly, No! caught conservative super-sleuth Don Surber calling out our very own Maria Cantwell for some ostensible plaigiarism:

Did Sen. Cantwell plagiarize a comic strip to praise Hillary? …

From Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press:

Sen. Maria Cantwell, one of them, introduced the New York senator to a crowd in Spokane and likened her to four-time Iditarod winner Susan Butcher and the Native American woman Sacajawea, who served as a guide for the Lewis and Clark expedition in the early 1800s. “We like women pioneers here in the Northwest,” Cantwell said. …

Now for the comic strip in question. [Click here if the image doesn't work.]

Maybe she didn’t see the comic strip, which appears in the Washington Post.

Gee, Don, ya think? It's an obscure strip called "Prickly City" that's so deadly unfunny no one but Instapundit fans read it. Hell, we can't even get Cantwell to respond to constituent e-mails -- why exactly would she be scouring right-wing comic strips for her speech ideas? And the strip only makes an obscure reference to the Iditarod, not Susan Butcher.

In other words, if there's a point to be had here, it's an incredibly stupid one.

Ah, but Surber later churlishly responds to his readers that they just "have no grasp of irony" and updates with a note that "perhaps people are taking this a little more serious than I meant."

Well, yeah, actually, people do tend to take charges of plagiarism pretty seriously these days, especially when a prominent public figure is involved. Then again, Surber seems to have flexible views about ripping off other people's ideas ...