There are already some attempts to discuss Ben Domenech as if it’s an isolated incident, “a few bad apples” to quote Donald Rumsfeld. His colleague at Redstate, Mike Krempasky, writes this:
If you, as many have done, dedicate thousands of man-hours to scrutinizing of his life’s work, you’ll find two things: First, you’ll find several instances of this behavior, some attributable to youth, and some not. Second, you’ll find an amazingly talented writer, a man of principle, and an earnest young activist seeking not to advance himself — though advance he did — but the things he believed in.
Put him up on a cross while you’re at it, huh?
Look. While Domenech’s violations were blatant, it is status quo for the conservative movement. Quite frankly, intellectual dishonesty is what these people do for a living (there are entire organizations dedicated to documenting and rebutting their ooze). Whether it’s cooking the books on environmental data, changing their stories to suit a new set of facts, or just straight up and up lying, cheating, and stealing, the conservative cause is simply a fraud.
They’ve put a lot of money into dressing up their fraud, from a bunch of well-staffed think tanks outputting shoddy research under the guise of science, to media outlets presenting propaganda as news, to activists who don’t think twice of appealing to the worst sort of bigotry in exchange for an electoral percentage or two, the conservative cause is composed of thousands of Ben Domenechs.
His only crime to them was that he got caught. Don’t believe them for a moment that they see a downside to what he did. Their only misgiving is that he didn’t do a good enough job covering his ass. Had Domenech’s work not been so simple to uncover (someone please give the Washington Post staff Google for Dummies), they would be expressing the same sentiment they had when his blog was launched. Their RedState blogger had landed at the Washington Post, and he would be able to inject even more of the fraudulent thinking that makes up conservatism into the mainstream.
It still remains to be seen whether his work is done. Apparently he’s still got work at Regnery, and I’m sure Fox News is always on the lookout for a “media ethics” expert (he can come on between the leaker and the convict).
But let this be a lesson to the mainstream press - if you keep listening to these guys and bring them into your institutions in order to present some sort of “balance”, you are going to get burned and burned and burned again. The next one may not be so dumb, but he’s almost guaranteed to believe in the same phony concepts and deceptive rhetoric. There’s an army of these guys (and gals) out there, and they’re up to no good.
I really would have a great deal more sympathy and respect for Ben if he enlisted. It would show he is willing to fight for his country, and in our Armed Forces he can gain a real education in the world, and a real education in various technologies that he can use when he gets out. When he gets out, if he wants to become a writer, he will have plenty of experiences to rely on.
http://goarmy.com
“and I m sure Fox News is always on the lookout for a media ethics expert (he can come on between the leaker and the convict).”
Now that was funny.
Our esteemed host wrote:
Oh, good grief! Surely you aren’t suggesting that the same scrutiny doesn’t exist in monitoring liberal writings?
Mr Domenech did something stupid, and he got caught; his career is probably ruined. But I wonder how many of us, from both the left and the right, have written things, completely innocently, that were if not lifted word for word from someone else’s work, at least has the very same ideas? I joked on another of your postings that Mr Domenech was now restricted to running for the enate from Delaware; I haven’t read anyone else saying the same thing, but I’d be very surprised if I was the first or only person to make such a comparison.
Of course, I really don’t understand the motivation for plagiarism in the first place. There is no statute of limitations on this, so you can do this once, and have it come back to haunt you thirty years from now; there have been so many examples that no serious writer could not have heard of them.
And the biggest point is that, if you cite someone else’s work, you are proving that you have done your research; I’d see more advantage to that than in being perceived as the original author in a lot of cases.
And Mr Willis: you’ve given us more than enough Ben Domenech posts recently; aren’t you due for another one about Jessica Alba?
Righties Owe The Post An Apology. Big Time
UPDATE: Oliver Willis: An Army Of Domenechs.
But let this be a lesson to the mainstream press - if you keep listening to these guys and bring them into your institutions in order to present some sort of balance, you are going to get burned and bur…
Ha! Would that it were so. As a commenter on another blog put it, I’m sure Mr. Domenench will have to endure whole agonizing days of unemployment before being offered a nice six figure sinecure at AEI or Heritage. Hell, as far as I know he still has his “editing” gig at Regnery.
And that’s really the thing which most pisses me off about this guy, and the others like him ( Pierce Bush ), which is going to be totally overlooked in the followup hand-wringing and whining on redstate.org about us cruel leftists.
This guy, like many right-wing bloviators, lectures us “liberal elitists” over and over about how “real Americans” feel about things. Yet the lives of guys like this in no way whatsover resemble those of “real Americans”, and I’m convinced that this is a big part of why they have no empathy whatsover for the poor and working classes.
Box Turtle Boy got every single damn thing in his life handed to him courtesy of Daddy’s money and political connections. He has never, for a single day, had to worry about where his next meal is coming from, whether he would be able to see a doctor if he got sick, whether he would get accepted into college, whether his parents could afford to pay for said college, or whether he’d be able to find a good job when he graduated.
Not that he even bothered with the latter. I’ve now read that it’s confirmed that Box Turtle didn’t even bother to graduate from William & Mary. Yet before even the 10th reunion of the class he would have been in had he gotten the diploma, he is writing speeches for Senators, playing editor at Regnery, being “the youngest Bush appointee”, and has a cushy writing gig at the Washington Post, one of the principal papers of record of our national discourse. Now, I agree with Atrios in that I think the importance of the college degree is overrated and it shouldn’t in general be considered a barrier to entry to a lot of professions; however I’m quite certain that there is no way on God’s earth that any other person without a degree could have gotten a fraction as far as Domenench without Daddy’s connections or something like.
Hell, the vast majority of people with fancy degrees couldn’t get so far so fast without connections. I attended an Ivy League university (U. of Pennsylvania - Go Quakers!, though I know this makes me another “elitist”), took up what most people would consider a somewhat rigorous field of study (physics), graduated with honors, and went on to post-graduate study in the same field. Nevertheless, upon graduation, I had some trouble finding a job and had some financial difficulties because of it (since resolved). There’s certainly no way I could have walked into the Senate or the Oval Office and said “OK, give me my gig now.”
Further, the only reason I could afford to attend such an “elitist” school is because of a combination of (a) scholarship money, (b) financial aid including Pell grants and work-study programs, (c) student loans, and (d) the “Penn Plan”, allowing tuition and fees to be payed over longer terms in installments, rather than in a lump sum at the start of the semester. Without all these, there is no way my family could have sent me to this school. My grandparents all immigrated here in the 1920s, and struggled to make it in a foreign land. My father, an Army veteran, could never have afforded our house payments and my college tuition, even spread out over a number of years, without being able to work overtime almost every day for decades at his job as a tool & die maker (a blue collar job which he always felt needed a Union because of how the workers were frequently shat upon by management). The very financial aid programs I mentioned that allowed me to attend an “elite” university have been severely cut by Ben’s patrons in this administration. Ben and his rich conservative friends insist they’re more in tune with “real America” than progressives like me, yet I somehow doubt he had to take out a single dime in student loans.
I came to my progressive (but overall fairly moderate, IMO) views precisely because of thinking about and understanding the kinds of struggles my parents and grandparents had to face. Yet, in the heated rhetoric poisoning our national discourse every day thanks to Box Turtle and his apologists, I am a crazy, America-hating, barking leftist moonbat elitist who is out of touch with “real Americans”. I defy anyone to look at the lives of Box Turtle, or Pierce “soon-to-be Senate intern” Bush, or President George “Connecticut raised but plays a cowboy on TV” W. Bush, and explain to me how they are more American, or more in touch with “heartland values”, or anything, than I am or millions of people like me are.
P.S. - Oliver, is there some way to modify the comment system so that HTML anchor tags referring to a web page with location markers (e.g., something like “http://foo.com/bar.html#marker”) will work? I wanted to provide some additional links to posts in the middle of external pages, but found if the “#” marker was there the comment system didn’t recognize the anchor tag or any text after it…
Random thoughts:
If you’re going to review a movie, see the movie. How frikkin’ hard is it to write a movie review, fachrissakes?
If you cite someone else’s work, cite it and credit the author. Don’t claim it as your own.
If your editors are in the habit of padding your columns with stuff you didn’t write, get another editor and report them to their superiors.
Lastly, I find it amusing that the supporters at RedState.org go to great lengths to blame the liberal blogosphere for the downfall of Mr. BTB. There is a great deal of name calling and gnashing of teeth. No one has chastised Mr. Ben for his intellectual laziness.
Now let’s pick up the shattered pieces and move on with our lives, shall we?
A quick count shows that our honored host has written seven separate posts on Ben Domenech in the past few days, but a website search, using this site’s own search engine, returned zero references to Jayson Blair.
Surely our host would never split differences on journalistic integrity based upon the political orientation of the offenders, would he? I guess that his search engine just missed the several articles he wrote about Mr Blair.
[...] e Spanish Prisoner
Posted by The Editors under Uncategorized
The way they play the game: While Domenech s violations were blatant, it is status quo for the cons [...]
I missed the part where Jayson Blair was a Democratic party operative and worked for the President.
If you want to discuss Jayson Blair, maybe you should do it on the con blogs- oops they don’t allow comments. My bad. Except for redstate, ironically enough.
Back to BTB, he is another faulty product from a long line of Young Republicans, cultivated from the think tanks. Bush White House appointee, check. Works for Regnery, check. Look for him soon at Faux with the rest of the fallen cons like Ollie North (felon).
when righties lose a debate they always play the ‘libruls do it too’ card. I dont remember any liberal defending Blair. When everyone agrees someone is wrong, why should there be a debate?
factcheck,
You didn’t miss the part about Blair being a liberal writer for the most liberal paper in the USA who just happened to be black , did you?
Your post is based on false premises, wrong is wrong. BTW, what does his race have to do with his plagiarism? Racist.
Lost in Space
wrote:
Were you to check the conservative sites, you’d see many of them have expressed a lot of disappointment in and condemnation of Mr Domenech’s actions; where was our esteemed host in doing so when Mr. Blair was trashing journalistic integrity.
A further site search for “Dan Rather,” “Mary Mapes,” “Rathergate” and “forged documents” returned zero hits as well; did our honored host fail to mention that sorry episode as well, or is it just that his search engine is less than efficient?
Factcheck failed to check his facts:
Try Patterico’s Pontifications or Sister Toldjah or even my own humble site; they all allow comments.
Dana demonstrates the common con tactic of “A Dem did something bad sometime in history, therefore Democrats cannot ever criticize any con.”
Intellectually bankrupt.
Youre wrong all the time Dana, there was only 1 forged document among many legitimate. And the jury is still out as to who forged it. Are you going to try to deflect this thread into every single instance of alleged liberal lying reporters? Plenty of liberals condemned Blair, NOBODY was defending him UNLIKE the way many righties are defending your plagiarist pal. Why would you expect this site to have written about something that had little to do with mr boxturtle and happened 4 years ago? Why do you have this expectation, given the equivalence youre trying to draw, even when most righty blogs havnt mentioned boxturtle or when they do mention him they praise him?
Bush is a deserter with political connections that let him get away with it. Just because 1 document that said so was forged doesnt mean its not the truth. Isnt it convenient to ignore all the evidence except for 1 forged document?
Lost in Space wrote:
If you read the report of the commission that CBS itself set up to investigate the “Rathergate” story, you’ll find that CBS royally screwed the pooch. The story was a complete fabrication.
You think that “many righties are defending (our) plagiarist pal?” Allow me to suggest that you try Patterico’s Domenech has a way with other peoples’ words, or Jeff Goldstein’s Domenech takes responsibility, in which he wrote:
Now, a lot of conservatives liked Mr Domenech, and some, including Mr Goldstein hope that he can eventually work his way back, but I haven’t read any which have said that he ought to suffer no professional punishment.
What I have said is that it seems somewhat hypocritical that condemnation from the left of the errors in journalism made by the left is so lacking; at least there was nothing to be found on Mr Willis’ site search engine.
Of course, I haven’t written anything on my site about this topic yet. Then again, I don’t recall ever even reading anything, original or purloined, by Mr Domenech; even I can’t read everything!
“you ll find that CBS royally screwed the pooch.”
Non denial denial, much? And BTW, how is that you consider the Jayson Blair scandal to be an example of “errors in journalism made by the left”? What’s your rationale for making that claim?
Uproariously funny! Lost in Space declares that President Bush is a deserter, but has no proof; if the 60 Minutes story had been valid, it wouldn’t have fallen apart the way it did.
And Frame calls it a “non-denial denial?” A man with a hate Bush agenda pushed forged documents on CBS News people with a similar agenda, and y’all call it real.
Mr Blair was writing making up stories to push for left wing social causes.
Dana, you don’t come here to debate, you come here to play stupid. You know the president is a deserter, and you know my name is outer_space not lost in space.
Ever think he’s not “playing” stupid?
“Mr Blair was writing making up stories to push for left wing social causes.”
He was?