Plagiarism is never acceptable *Updated*

OK you rabid little monkeys, stop sending me hate mail demanding that I comment on Ben Domenech.

For those who don’t follow the blogosphere like a soap opera, Ben was hired by the Washington Post to write a conservative blog called Red America.  This sent the left side of the blogosphere into a mad frenzy.  After a week or so of digging, they discovered that Ben was lifting passages from various sources and passing them off as his own, and had been for some time.

Ben is a founding member of the blog/community site RedState, a site I stopped participating in some time ago when the Kool-Aid got too strong.  Needless to say, RedState ignored all evidence and backed Ben.  Ben then lied in a front-page post and blamed an old editor for one example, but gave no explanation for the many, many examples that NRO discovered.  Apparently, the RedState crowd is now on a mission to hate anyone who doesn’t forgive and support Ben (read the comments, it’s like a brainwashed cult of personality, you’d think they were DU members defending Dan Rather in there), and that includes conservative who dare to hold him to the standards to which we hold everyone else.

Bottom line: Ben Domenech is a thief and a liar who has done grave damage to the credibility of right-wing bloggers everywhere, and for that alone he deserves to be shunned and dismissed from ever being a driving force in the conservative movement.  One apology doesn’t negate what he did.

I refuse to defend his actions nor do I forgive him.  Trying to shift the focus onto his detractors doesn’t cut it for me...as horrible as they are (the things they said before they discovered the plagiarism were out of line, but that’s Atrios’ crowd for you) it has no bearing on the truth that he stole the work of others and passed it off as his own.

Goodbye, Ben.  I hope that you suffer greatly for this, but that eventually you decide to take a job doing anything but being a pundit.  We deserve better than people like you who taint the entire concept of conservatism.  You are nothing more than a “red state” Jayson Blair.  You made us all look like fools.  Thanks, asshole.

The odd part of this is that I end up feeling like defending Michelle Malkin, who cut bait with Domenech when she saw the evidence.  She was right this time.  We demand that the left police their own, where do we get off not doing the same?

*UPDATE*

Nice to see Steve saying the same things:

This irks me because it relates to a pet peeve of mine: people who have no talent and nothing to say, and who don’t like to write, yet who somehow insist on thinking of themselves as writers. Domenech obviously qualifies.

Writers are particularly vulnerable to thieves like Domenech, because all you have to do to pass yourself off as the writer of a piece of work is to cut and paste. You can’t do that in other areas of art. You can’t run around telling people you’re Brad Pitt, or that the guy credited with Baryshnikov’s dancing is actually you. You can’t sing in Frank Sinatra’s voice or tell people a Sinatra recording is something you made in your basement.

If you can’t f___ing write, why would you pretend to be a writer? Why would you choose this profession? Do people who hate cooking become chefs? Do people who hate lying become politicians?

...

I’m sorry, but it really makes me mad that a punk like this would smell up the more-honorable side of American politics and make bloggers look even dumber than Pajamas Media and Wonkette did. People are handling him with kid gloves because he’s their buddy. Well, he’s not my buddy and I don’t know him, so screw him.

Well said.  More here from Don Surber.

*UPDATE* 2

Dan Riehl says:

I don’t care about the left. But many of the right are allowing their own ideology to interfere with their principled judgment. The word for that is cronyism. And serial plagiarists and liars, which Ben Domenech proved himself to be in his first non-apology to all this, do not deserve cronies. At least not ones willing to stand on principle regardless of politics.

That’s what we regularly ask the MSM to do and we loudly point it out when they don’t. If the right blogosphere is to be the principled media it would purport to be, if it’s ever to mature, it’s time to apply some of our principles to ourselves.

If we fail to do so, that would ultimately be the significant failing in and around the relatively insignificant Ben Domenech. And it would be our failure, not his.

Bingo.

Posted by JimK at 03:57 PM on March 25, 2006
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