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.
UPDATE: Read Joe Conason's take. And Salon has a compendium of Domenech's plagiarisms.
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