ADVANTAGE — BLOGOSPHERE! Last week, The American Prowler had a piece entitled J. Edgar Mueller. Today, William Safire has a column entitled J. Edgar Mueller. Okay, they’re not really that similar, but it’s fun.

UPDATE: And Katie Granju has another example. But, you know, I’m not convinced that this kind of thing deserves any more than a cutesy “I said it first” with a wink. When you’re talking about an FBI director, the “J. Edgar ___” construction isn’t exactly on a par with the discovery of oxygen, after all. And once you note that somebody thinks that calling George Bush a “cowboy” is an insult, well, the piece kind of writes itself.

I’m constantly getting picked on for saying that people are too quick to claim theft of ideas. But, really, there aren’t that many new ideas out there. And I’m not that big about owning any ideas I may have anyway. My own feeling, frankly, is that if people write a column around an idea that they saw on InstaPundit, that’s not theft — that’s influence. Which is a good thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more I wonder. There are tens of thousands of blogs. If you’re a columnist, probably anything you write has already been said by some blogger somewhere. So what do you do? Never, ever read blogs, so you can assert that as a defense? That’s a bad thing — for columnists and for weblogs. I think we need a pretty high standard here. If it’s not outright word-for-word plagiarism, I don’t think it’s worthy of complaint.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And the column in question turns out to have been filed on Thursday — before the post that allegedly inspired it. People often think of the same things in response to the same stimuli, folks. As Alexander Lindey wrote: “Most parallels rest on the assumption that if two successive things are similar, the second one was copied from the first. This assumption disregards all the other possible causes of similarity.”