Columnist plagiarizes self

Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Littwin October 12 on the Rockies' first playoff game against the Arizona Diamondbacks, in a piece titled "So who's watching this 'serious baseball?'" (third graf):

It was billed as a series for the serious baseball fan, which, as we know, is hardly a recipe for ratings success. For most baseball fans, being "serious" means getting to the concession stand twice before the national anthem — not memorizing the stats of players they literally can't tell without a scorecard.

Nobody seemed to care about this series outside of Denver and Phoenix, and, let's face it, you had to be generous to include baseball-mild Phoenix in that calculus.

And today, on Friday's game, in a piece titled "Theme for the night was walking" (24th graf):

This was billed as a series for the serious baseball fan, which, as we know, is hardly a recipe for ratings success. For most baseball fans, being "serious" means getting to the concession stand twice before the national anthem — not memorizing the stats of players they literally can't tell without a scorecard.

Nobody seemed to care about this series outside of Denver and Phoenix, and, let's face it, you had to be generous to include baseball-mild Phoenix in that calculus.

That's it, those two paragraphs. One might wonder why Littwin would find such feeble japes worthy of recycling, and from one column to the next, yet, but whatever the reason, there they are. I now demand an examination of every single (except, I suppose, the first) column of the (estimated) 16,782 Littwin has written over the last 400 years for similar self-plagiary. (Or any other kind, for that matter.)

Incidentally, Littwin, a sportswriter promoted to his level of incompetence as a liberal political columnist (who still occasionally covers sports), has written on the Churchill scandal a number of times in columns noted for their cluelessness.