Being an avid reader of the Iowa State Daily editorial page, I read RJ Green’s notably clever in yesterday’s Iowa State Daily, “Cows teach lesson on government.”

It’s a shame that it wasn’t his words and was clearly and openly plagiarized.

I thought those words sounded familiar, a faint echo of familiarity in the back of my mind. So I typed in the first line of the letter in a Google search and came up with a surprising amount of hits. Turns out that the joke is a common one, and that it’s word-for-word from Maxim Online’s joke of the day. (www.maximonline.com/jokes/joke_1569.html)

Kudos to RJ on the great joke and even better source (yet undocumented), but RJ must be writing so often that he can’t think up of his own material. I would now like to quote and document — thereby not plagiarizing — Thumper in the Disney movie “Bambi.”

Thumper repeats after his mother, “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Thumper is disappointed in your plagiarism, RJ and please contribute your own stuff.

Lee Beck

Freshman

Agricultural Biochemistry