In the late 1940s the attack dogs of the extreme American right first began to howl about Hollywood.

In the paranoid Cold War climate that prevailed, Reds were routinely being spotted under every bed – including the ornate four-posters at some of the more fashionable addresses in Beverly Hills and Bel Air.

The right’s more excitable agitators went so far as to claim the US entertainment industry had been comprehensively infiltrated by subversives intent on using film and television as propaganda tools of Soviet Communism.

This allegation prompted the legendary wit Dorothy Parker to choke on her Martini.

Having spent time on the West Coast labouring on screenplays for the dream-factory assembly line, she scoffed at the notion a secret sympathy for Communism might be colouring any of Hollywood’s output.

The only –Ism Hollywood believes in, Mrs Parker sniffed, is in fact plagiarism.

Funnily enough much the same applies to politics. A tendency to recycle other people’s ideas without attribution, to annex resonant turns of phrase or even entire essays or speeches, is deeply ingrained among politicians, their packagers and handlers regardless of creed, party affiliation or loyalty to any particular -Ism.

In fact Robert Benchley’s sardonic rule-of-thumb about the twin wellsprings of creative writing has proved to be just as applicable to the political variety: “Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted.”

Bermuda has experienced one of those “Gotcha!” moments so beloved of political commentators and propagandists in recent days when a local example of such easily adapted originality was uncovered and offered up as a shattering case study in moral turpitude.

One Bermuda Alliance MP Leah Scott’s shameless and silly decision to cut and paste sections of an American magazine article into a Letter To The Editor published by The Royal Gazette last week was as straightforward an exercise in literary shoplifting as any imaginable. There was no acknowledgement of her original source.

Additionally, hardly any attempt was made to rearrange or shape or synthesise the previously published material into something more than the sum of its hand-me-down parts to reinforce the points she was attempting to make.

She was quickly called on her pilfering on social media and the predictable firestorm has ensued.

The Opposition is calling for her head (or at least her resignation as Junior Education Minister). The Premier is standing by a colleague who he says is much chastened and profoundly remorseful.

The public, by and large, seems to be more bemused than outraged by the whole affair.

Given the low regard politicians are generally held in at present in Bermuda, allegations of an ethical lapse involving plagiarism are, frankly, not going to rile up anyone who isn’t already planning to vote against the OBA.

And before it decides to use plagiarism as the pretext for embarking on a Great Crusade against Ms Scott’s overall probity and integrity, the Opposition might do well to remind itself that not too many years ago it could count an astonishingly audacious serial offender of its own in its Parliamentary ranks.

During a particularly memorable exchange on the Motion to Adjourn in the early 1990s, maverick United Bermuda Party Member of Parliament Harry Viera catalogued more than one hundred instances when the legislator in question had attempted to pass off witty observations, asides and rejoinders gleaned from books of quotations as his own.

Describing the flamboyant and silver-tongued Progressive Labour Party MP as a “literary second-storey man”, Mr Viera cited and footnoted examples of second-hand Parliamentary repartee which had been drawn from uncredited sources as varied as Rudyard Kipling, Malcolm X and made-for-TV movies.

The offending MP remained adamantly unmoved despite this very public dressing down.

He replied that since the original speakers and writers were, in the main, long-since dead they had no further use for their old words so he was simply putting them to some creative new uses. And his cheeky effrontery was cheered on by most of his PLP colleagues.

When it comes to making accusations involving politicians dressing their words in borrowed finery, it is a brave (or reckless) soul who casts the first stone.

As Mrs Parker warned, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t. But that’s yet to stop the vast majority of politicos and their hangers-on from taking up residence in them.