Errr, no, it's not. There are other reasonable inferences: that the programmer isn't concerned about efficiency of the running code but instead with his efficiency in coding; that the programmer originally had the code doing one thing, but changed it to do another and hasn't (yet) noticed that it's now redundant; that it's not wrong code, but instead redundant code so qwitcherbellyaching and submit a patch.

I parse HTML with regexps when I know it's been machine-generated with a certain structure and I'm only interested in pulling out the bits using re.search(r'blah(%s)blah') that got put in there with a printf "blah$(x)blah".

You're going to be tarring a lot of not-incorrect code with that brush of yours.