Dan Abrams Implies Jake Tapper's Plagiarizing Jon Stewart

Look out! Here comes a liberal media feud. On his MSNBC program every night, host Dan Abrams hosts a media-criticism segment called "Beat the Press." On Thursday night, Abrams heavily implied ABC’s Jake Tapper is a plagiarist, stealing snarky lines from Jon Stewart. We dislike Tapper putting too much snark in the breakfast buffet. But if you’re going to level a serious charge like plagiarism, you better not take your target out of context. Guess what? Abrams did. Take a look:

ABRAMS: Finally, you have to wonder sometimes whether the folks at ABC News, they get all their material from their own heads, they come up with it. Here's Jon Stewart on CNN over two weeks ago talking about the Democrats and how they allocate delegates, and then ABC’s Jake Tapper.

STEWART: Feel better. Have a delegate and a trophy saying you're number one.

TAPPER: Democrats distribute them proportionately. It’s kinda like T-ball where every child gets a trophy.

ABRAMS: I don't know. It sounds kind of familiar.

But the Abrams clip-snipper sliced Tapper in half – right before he credited the T-ball joke to another snark specialist, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. From Thursday’s GMA, a transcript from MRC's Scott Whitlock:

TAPPER: Unlike the Republicans winner-take-all contests, Democrats distribute delegates proportionately. It's kind of like T-ball where every child gets a trophy. Or so says Dana Milbank, author of a book studying the sociology of Washington D.C. animals.

DANA MILBANK (Author, "Homo Politicus"): They don't want to have losers in the party, so they've created it so nobody loses. But, unfortunately, the flip side of that is nobody wins and that can be kind of awkward when you actually have to have a nominee.

So would Dan Abrams accuse Dana Milbank of plagiarism? Or would that be too troublesome, considering Milbank’s a regular contributor to Keith Olbermann’s nightly snark opera, the one that comes on right before the Abrams hour?

Or did Milbank beat Stewart to the trophy-for-everyone jokes? Or, as often happens in jokes and cartoons, did several people conceive the same fairly obvious gag at roughly the same time?

This isn't a liberal bias thing. But it does suggest that Abrams is administering some journalistic "Bush League Justice" to Tapper.