'Red America' man have forked tongue

The harsh light of exposure and a million fact-checkers have claimed a fresh scalp – this time that of Ben Domenech, late conservative blogging firebrand added to the Washington Post this week in a spirit of ideological affirmative action. Domenech resigned his post today, before the Post had completed its investigation, according to Executive Editor Jim Brady. He had written a blog called Red America.

It seems Domenech had been recycling…now isn’t that something of incredible appeal to the liberal crowd thumbing through the pages of the Post? He was re-using society’s detritus; saving Mother Earth…Gaia ought to be down with that. Trouble is, he was recycling other people’s writing, changing a couple words, and then passing that off as his own work. On the job at the Post for a couple days, Domenech’s skeletons came leaping out of the closet.

Some examples are posted here, in The American Thinker.

I’ve been bothered by plagiarism plenty in my time. Students in high school copied papers I’d written, I saw college classmates plagiarize their way to high marks and I’ve even had letters submitted to the editor (me) which plagiarized stories or editorials which I had penned.

That’s why I’m completely fierce on the issue of plagiarism. My kids know my position: I’d rather have them get a lower grade submitting their own thoughts than get a higher grade stealing someone else’s. I’ve had a couple run-ins with exchange students we’ve hosted who plagiarized material routinely for school assignments in their home countries. They were incredulous that the United States works under a system where writers always clearly identify their citations or try to stick to original thought.

A plagiarist is not a writer or a thinker in my view, he/she is simply an accumulator and arranger.

And the sad part is that Domenech had to have seen this coming…it’s too easy these days to check the originality of phrase and thought through the internet; and being a child of the digital age, he was surely conversant with Google. It appears he was willing to trade his 15 minutes of fame for lingering disdain.

His choice. I'd rather be an unread original than a wildly popular literary leech.

And kudos to the (mainly liberal) crowd with pitchforks and torches who brought this to light; though in it for somewhat partisan purposes, they changed the quality of discourse on the internet for the better.