This Washington Post thing is rapidly becoming a blood bath. We've moved on from Domenech's funeral-day assertion that Coretta Scott King was a communist, or his comparison of the Supreme Court to the Klu Klux Klan. Those are small things. Now it's getting
bad.
From Oregon Guy and fleshed out further by James at Your Logo Here -- who is himself on a spectacular Box Turtle Ben rampage -- we learn that some instances of Ben's much-vaunted homeschooled teen wonderism in college actually came from, well, flagrant plagiarism of published works.
...Ben's lyrical stylings on a real party are completely lifted from P.J. O'Rourke's "Modern Manners" - a chapter entitled "Real Parties." I should have known as this is one of the gifts my older brother gave me years ago that did not involve punching me in the nads.
O'Rourke, p.176: Office Christmas parties. Wine-tasting parties. Book-publishing parties. Parties with themes, such as "Las Vegas Nite" or "Waikiki Whoopee". Parties at which anyone is wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket.
BenDom: Christmas parties. Wine tasting parties. Book publishing parties. Parties with themes, such as "Las Vegas Nite" or "Waikiki Whoopee." Parties at which anyone is wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket.
O'Rourke: It's not a real party if it doesn't end in an orgy or a food fight. All your friends should still be there when you come to in the morning.
BenDom: It's not a real party if it doesn't end in an orgy or a food fight. All your friends should still be there when you come to in the morning.
(And more here here.)
Reader silence found another example, in which Domenech plagiarized an entirely different piece, this time from Salon:
From a Ben Domenech review of Bringing Out the Dead:
Instead of allowing for the incredible nuances that Cage always brings to his performances, the character of Frank sews it all up for him.
But there are those moments that allow Cage to do what he does best. When he's trying to revive Mary's father, the man's family fanned out around him in the living room in frozen semi-circle, he blurts out, "Do you have any music?"
From a review posted on salon.com, published about a week earlier:
Instead of allowing for the incredible nuance that Cage always brings to his performances, the character of Frank sews it all up for him. ... But there are those moments that allow Cage to do what he does best. When he's trying to revive Mary's father, the man's family fanned out around him in the living room in frozen semi-circle, he blurts out, "Do you have any music?"
[UPDATE -- Atrios is collecting example after example of more plagiarism by Domenech.]
[UPDATE 2 -- silence continues to find more and more. Here's a movie review Ben "wrote" for the National Review that contained snippets taken from Steve Murray.]
[UPDATE 3 -- Oh, the irony... he even bylined material to himself that he took from, you guessed it, the Washington Post.]
[UPDATE 4 -- Via Atrios and his commenters again, the examples keep coming.]
That's one way to polish your credentials as an up-and-coming writer -- copy and paste from someone who actually has talent. Excelsior!
More Washington Post news below, because this is just the story that keeps on giving. Someone's getting fired over this one, if the media as a whole has even a shred of ethics actually left.
Next, though trivial compared to evidence of out-and-out plagiarism, from
Alex Koppelman, we learn that despite Ben being very put out that people are attacking his new column using mean language (LOL), Ben's so-called contributions to the national discourse include an ongoing parade of gems:
- Teresa Heinz Kerry looks like an "oddly shaped egotistical ketchup-colored muppet."
- Michael Moore is "fatty fat fat fat," a "blimp that crashed into the Fleet Center [causing] nearly $16 million in damage."
- Andrew Sullivan, who is gay, "needs a woman to give him some stability."
- Pat Robertson is "a whacked out loon."
- Cartoonist Ted Rall is "a steaming bag of pus."
Read the whole thing, it's a masterful analysis of the kind of blistering dishonesty, feces-slinging and hackiness that defines the Coulter -- Malkin -- Domenech style of far-right debate.
Mind you, here's what Ben says now, responding to what can only be described as an uncouth peasant uprising against him on the Washington Post's comment sections:
I'm happy that no one's engaged in any ridiculous hyperbole, unfounded accusations or unintentionally hilarious name-calling. We can all agree that such things lower the quality of debate on the Internet, play to the worst side of our knee-jerk partisan nature and have no place in the modern public square. I look forward to engaging you in a serious, respectful discussion on the issues that matter most to the future of our nation.
I'm sorry, Ben, but I have a serious question. Am I a bad person because I can't stop laughing, at this point?
Last but oh so not least, from Steve Gilliard and our own RedDan, we have an extended excerpt from the Journal First Things that Domenech put up on RedState. In an effort to make an anti-abortion argument, it jumps feetfirst into a "white man's burden" form of seething it's-not-racism racism so perfected by the far-far-right.
It begins spectacularly:
People who are poor and black are a drag on society. We would all be better off if there were fewer of them. Since we have, with little success, spent trillions of dollars over the past several decades trying to make poor blacks non-poor, it is time we recognize that there are more efficient means of eliminating the drag.
[...]
It just happens that killing black babies has the happy result of reducing crime. I do not question the research or logic of Levitt's argument. If a specifiable group is inordinately responsible for a social problem, it follows that eliminating a large number of people belonging to that group will reduce the problem.
Mind you, this post isn't racist, oh, no, as you can see by reading the rest. It's just intended to helpfully point out that black leaders are responsible for the murder of babies under the mantle of cleansing undesirable elements.
Read the rest to understand the arguments endorsed by Domenech as the sorts of highbrow far-far-right thinking that he's now been hired to bring to the Washington Post website.
So I've got a question for the Washington Post, and especially online editor Jim Brady. Why did you hire this guy? What, in particular, about his past, or his writings, or his sources, appealed to you as being Washington Post material?
Go ahead and ask them here or here, if their blog servers are back up from last night's apparent outage.