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)