The Gift that Keeps on Giving...

No, no, Scott! Ben Domenech is so funny because he is so pathetic. I expected to find a huge amount of hypocrisy and stupidity. But even I didn't expect to find large-scale serial plagiarism. I mean, Elmer Gantry was at least competent:

Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment: If it weren't so pathetic it would be hilarious. The Washington Post, caving in to a right-wing campaign against its blogger-columnist Dan Froomkin, recently hired a raging young conservative named Ben Domenech to start a blog called "Red America." If it were serious about balance, the Post would then have hired someone like Tom Tomorrow or Kos to bring the scales back to level. But then, they have track records. And they're not plagiarists.

Domenech, it turns out, spent his college years at William and Mary cribbing whole paragraphs from movie reviews in Salon (and other reviews by Steve Rhodes, and other pieces by P.J. O'Rourke.) I don't know which is worse: the act itself or the stupidity of doing so in 1999, as a college student in the Internet era, when you just have to know that it will catch up with you someday. Shouldn't he at least have been copying from National Review or the New Criterion? Did he figure none of his conservative pals would read Salon, so he could pilfer with abandon?

However the story plays out -- and it will, fast -- the black eye for the Post is, sadly, deserved.

Domenech has already posted an apology for complaining that President Bush shouldn't have attended Coretta Scott King's funeral because she was a "Communist." So far, no attempt to explain the multiple acts of plagiarism.

Comments

[christofay]

Josh, Josh, anyone, how to explain this one?

[BruceMoomaw]

As with Michael Brown, George Deutsch and Claude Allen, it is impossible to avoid the paranoid suspicion that some of these people are liberal moles — until, that is, you look at Donald Rumsfeld’s performance and consider that the President still solidly supports him.

[John Palcewski]

Oh, the top dogs at WaPo are all hunkered down right now, wondering WTF to say in the morning. Maybe someone put in a call to Uncle Karl, the chief fascist swine. First grunt out of his fat snout was directions on how to make a list of the moonbats who outed the boy. Then specfic grunts on how to slime them, call them soft on terra, and tratitors.

But wait. That pigshit won't stick to the wall anymore. What to do? What to do?

Grunt some more, you swine. November is fast approaching.