I still think they’re partisan hacks, but even the Corner at NRO has issued an apology for the plagiarism committed by Ben Domenech when he wrote for them. They go through and actually pull out sample quotes and include them. The apology seems sincere. I’ve gained a lot of respect for them in this.

I’ve been thinking about this for a bit off and on over the last few days. I don’t want to read too much into a single situation, but most of what I’ve been thinking is how someone like Domenech believes they’ll get away with this type of behavior. This isn’t a Jayson Blair type who’s simply trying to make a reporting name for himself. This is a person who aims to create controversy and to provoke people that disagree with him.

One thing I’ve learned about the political blogosphere is that they are nothing if not vicious and thorough. Do something to irk the blogs and they will descend, en mass, onto Google, Yahoo, personal contacts and friends, and build a thorough catalog of your life. Domenech, a “prominent” member of this community and founder of Redstate.org, must know this.

So, knowing that folks like Media Matters would get PDFs of the actual print editions and that Google will turn up every electronic version of his articles, why did he continue to lie? Why?

Is it possible that he didn’t understand the severity of what he was doing? That changing a few words here and there still constitutes plagiarism? Nearly every English teacher I had in high school emphasized the importance of not plagiarizing others’ works. It was hammered into us from the very first term papers, perhaps even in middle school.

Again, I don’t want to read too much into it, but Domenech is proud that he was home schooled. Perhaps he didn’t get this lesson at home? Whatever the case, it’s clear that he doesn’t get it. His latest defense is that one of his pieces was “inspired” by the original and ran credited as such. Even then, taking the original text and just changing sentences is still plagiarism unless you quote the parts you left alone. That’s not inspiration, that’s recycling a column.

The hatred and angst here is unfortunate, and ultimately not a helpful thing. Just read some of the comments on the various blog posts I’ve linked to… ugh. In the end, however, this guy should’ve resigned as he did earlier today. And, quite frankly, he should’ve apologized right away when he was caught rather than coming up with seemingly absurd defenses for his actions. Didn’t the Republican world have something to say about that with a certain ex-President?

I posted earlier about the new “Red America” blog at WashingtonPost.com. The blog is really pretty silly, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it will, in the end, be a pretty unimportant blog. It’s still infuriating that the Post felt that they needed a conservative blog with no ideological equivalent on the left.

However, the story took a weird turn today as numerous folks found evidence of plagiarism in Domenech’s earlier works. Many of these are movie reviews, which apparently are OK to plagiarize if you’re a conservative partisan. Some are from college, others are from his professional writing career (such as it is, writing for uber-partisan NRO, etc.).

I wrote music reviews at Hopkins for the News-Letter for a short while. I realized it wasn’t as important as my academic writing, but even then I approached it with the same set of ethics and integrity. Plagiarism is wrong, period. Wholesale copying of sentences and paragraphs goes beyond paraphrasing or inspiration. It’s clearly laziness and representative of the type of ethical deficiencies that should prevent someone from getting a gig at a place like WashingtonPost.com.

(first instance found via Atrios)