ok. then right, it's the vaguer question of whether his site deserves to rank higher than it does for a particular term.

on brief glance, it doesn't look like he optimizes for "polygraph". He does rank #1 for antipolygraph.

I do not consider the question of whether actual authoritative content should outrank hacked pages with duplicate content to be ”vague”.

but that's not the issue here. There is no example where duplicate content is outranking his. In the quoted query, he ranks higher. Beyond that he says he doesn't rank well for "polygraph", but not that it's outranked by the spammy content.

The timing is also interesting, as Google has recently updated their search engine results to be more "context aware", which may result in sites like that dropping in the rankings since their subject matter is actually a bit different than what people searching for "polygraph" might expect.