The dust is settling now on l'affaire Ben Domenech at the WashingtonPost website, wherein an aggressive, undertalented, arch-Conservative young writer was hired to helm WaPo's first right-wing blog, presumably to counter the so-called liberal tendencies of White House Briefing columnist Dan Froomkin (background here). Debate about whether he had any business doing so was cut short by the discovery that the young buck was a massive plagiarist, with examples of his lifted prose found here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here (and here).
Slate's Jack Shafer defends WaPo's Jim Brady, weirdly missing the point by stating that Brady shouldn't have had to vet Domenech for plagiarism beforehand. This seems to me obvious (that would place a ridiculous burden on an editor), and to be honest I don't recall seeing anyone demand that of Brady.*
What I did see — happily — was left and right united on the important point: plagiarism is bad. The NRO's Corner, home to many a lifted Domenech article, immediately investigated the charges and confirmed that Domenech had lifted for a number of pieces, apologizing to its readers saying "there is no excuse for plagiarism." Even Michelle Malkin regretfully concluded that "the side-by-side comparisons of these extensive passages is damning." She goes on to note: "I certainly understand the impulse on the Right to rally around Domenech. But I can't ignore the plain evidence."
Wow. If even SHE can't ignore the plain evidence, the we learn two things: sometimes the "moonbat hordes" ARE useful, and sometimes — sometimes! — the Left and Right can agree! Let's face it, the Right doesn't really want this guy as their spokesman, and the Left would much rather have won this one the merits. The only thing settled here was that Ben Domenech thought he could get away with appropriating huge chunks of other people's work (actually, he almost did). That's not really satisfying for anyone.
Soon the battle will rage again over whoever Jim Brady appoints to Red America, and whether should be a Blue America too, plus everything in between. But in the meantime, it's heartening that Left and Right can call a truce on this and show respect for the journalistic bedrock principles of originality and attribution. Hey, it's the little things.
In other news, I take enormous solace in the fact that last week Ben's enemies spent their time bashing him, instead of America. I totally wrote that line.
*Shafer's two links supporting this point are as follows: "Hundreds of bloggers wanted to know: What could Jim Brady of Washingtonpost.com have been thinking?" wherein "bloggers" is linked to a Daily Kos post that listed four examples of Domenech's plagiarism; and "the blogosphere pummeled Brady" is expressed in a BlogPulse graph reflecting mentions of "Ben Domenech" in the blogosphere. Presumably some of those mentioned Brady, but it's a little sloppy not to provide a more clear-cut example here. Please also note that Shafer does not link to a single blog post specifically calling out Brady for not checking for plagiarism. Performing due diligence on a new hire by reading previous clips is not the same as cross-googling every movie and music review from the last five years (though it seems that's about how much Domenech lifted).