aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Ralph & The Red and Black

Ralph Reed, a former Georgia state Republican Party chairman and candidate for lieutenant governor in a primary race that’s gettting a little rough (and still a Microsoft consultant) has a “checkered” past at The Red & Black, the student paper at the University of Georgia. From Outside the Tent:

According to an article that appeared in the October 1996 issue of Esquire (summarized here), Ralphie wrote an article for the newspaper entitled “Gandhi: The Ninny of the Twentieth Century.” (One might wonder why Ralphie might have chosen some more obvious candidates for this title other than Gandhi, but I digress.)

An alert student at the University noticed that Ralphie’s column bore more than a passing resemblance to “The Gandhi Nobody Knows” by Richard Grenier published in the March 1983 edition of Commentary. (One wonders what devout Christian Ralphie was doing reading a publication of the American Jewish Committee, but I digress again.) According to a letter written by the student “every assertion, every quote, and several seemingly original Reed phrases may be found directly or in slightly modified form” in the Grenier article.

Ralph was fired from the paper shortly thereafter. Ralph’s response at the time (according to an article from Time Magazine quoted here) was to say that the letter exposing him constituted “the most shocking, profane form of personal attack I can imagine.”