Ben has owned up to his mistakes. He has, as I anticipated he would, taken that most difficult first step to rehabilitating his credibility. Now it's time for other folks to do the same: Molly Ivins; Larry Tribe; Stephen Ambrose; Dan Rather; Jason Leopold; Joe Biden; Micah Wright; Ward Churchill; Eason Jordan; CNN's agreement with Saddam's Iraq; Joe Wilson; Steve Erlanger—we're looking at you.
Since Jim Brady is intent on his mission to hire a conservative blogger (specifically a social or cultural one) I've been thinking hard about who it should be.
I honestly can't think of one. I don't mean that there aren't any decent conservatives. But Brady doesn't want a "conservative even liberals like" or a soft-pedalng David Brooks clone. He wants a hardcore "Red Stater."
I really can't think of any who would fit that bill who won't embarrass the hell out of them.
Put another way, the Administration has seized the power of Congress to make the laws, they have seized the power of the judiciary to interpret the laws, and they execute them as well. They have consolidated within themselves all of the powers of the government, particularly with regard to national security. This situation is, of course, exactly what Madison warned about in Federalist 47; it really is the very opposite of everything our Government is intended to be:
...
As usual, the most amazing aspect of all of this is not that the Administration is claiming these powers. It is that even as it claims them as expressly and clearly as can be, the Congress continues to ignore it and pretend that it still retains power to restrict the Administration by the laws it passes. And the media continues to fail in its duty to inform the country about the powers the Administration has seized, likely because they are so extreme that people still do not really believe that the Administration means what they are saying. What else do they need to do in order to demonstrate their sincerity?
He explained the passage that appeared to be copied from Mr. O'Rourke's book by saying that Mr. O'Rourke gave him permission.
Contacted at his home in New Hampshire, Mr. O'Rourke said that he had never heard of Mr. Domenech and did not recall meeting him.
"I wouldn't want to swear in a court of law that I never met the guy, Mr. O'Rourke said of Mr. Domenech, "but I didn't give him permission to use my words under his byline, no."
Yah, look, this was ridiculous from the beginning. I'm sure it's quite possible Ben chatted with O'Rourke and said "Dude I wanna update your party description for my college!" and O'Rourke said "yeah, great idea!"
But that isn't permission to rip off most of it while changing just a few words.
17-year-olds do dumb stuff, their 24-year-old versions shouldn't be trying to justify that stuff.
It confirms one thing I knew was true and which wasn't really controversial, but which both the Post and Salon got wrong - Ben never graduated college. I emailed Salon about it but I couldn't provide solid enough evidence (by my own admission) and the college offices were closed so they couldn't confirm it.
And, again, note I don't give a shit if people have college degrees. I welcome a changed world where such things have diminished importance.
Not all of it's tremendously galling, some of it's understandable sloppy practices from a young writer which in isolation would be no big deal. I think it's made a bit worse, contra Red State mutterings, that he was doing movie reviews and the like where my first thought would be to, you know, watch the movie and write a review. Maybe do some internet research about some basic biographical facts, or whatever, but it wouldn't occur to me to research my review by reading the reviews that others had done.
The FEC has released its draft regulations which they'll vote on Monday. On advice of counsel I'll withhold public comment for the moment, but said counsel has the details.
Notable for the inclusion of an actual progressive pundit:
Meet the Press hosts Sec/State Condoleezza Rice and a roundtable of Washington Post's David Broder, New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller, Cook Report's Charlie Cook, and Wall Street Journal's John Harwood. Face the Nation hosts NSA Stephen Hadley and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). This Week hosts Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) and a roundtable of George Will, Fareed Zakaria and Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel. Fox News Sunday hosts Rice and Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). Late Edition hosts Rice and Sens. Jack Reed (D-RI) and Pat Roberts (R-KS).
In his excuse making Box Turtle Ben implied that when he ripped off PJ O'Rourke that it was labelled with "as inspired by O'Rourke's original." I'm not entirely sure if he intended to make that claim or if it was just sloppy writing (as this was something he wrote himself it's hard to tell). Either way no such disclaimer was on it.
I know there are those who understandably wonder why the Box Turtle Affair is of any real importance. In and of itself it isn't but it speaks volumes about how our conservative establishment media sees itself and what its role is and should be.
Brady said the site picked Domenech for two reasons: he's conservative and provocative. Brady denied that the paper hired Domenech as a way to deflect criticism from the right that Dan Froomkin, one of its most popular columnists, is too liberal. "That's not true and it never was," he said.
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And the site still wants someone on the right. "A conservative columnist, a conservative blogger, whatever it ends up being. Certainly we're looking, but I don't know the timeframe," Brady said.
Asked if the site is looking for a liberal, he said, "Potentially, potentially."
As the previous links on the matter mention, at least one of the pieces Ben Domenech is accused of having plagiarized was a movie review for National Review Online. A side-by-side comparison to another review of the same film speaks for itself. There is no excuse for plagiarism and we apologize to our readers and to Steve Murray of the Cox News Service from whose piece the language was lifted. With some evidence of possible problems with other pieces, we're also looking into other articles he wrote for NRO.
The transcripts really don't do this justice. Matthews practically sounded like he was crying during parts of this. From the Imus newsletter:
Imus speaks to MSNBC's Chris Matthews about the decision to go to war in Iraq:
Imus: "I forgot who said this, it could have been Tom Friedman or, and I always thought that after September 11th, the administration wanted, maybe they always wanted to go to war with Iraq or whatever, but they wanted to demonstrate to the Muslim community and the Muslim world that we were not going to take that and that we were going to strike back at somebody and they picked what they thought was going to be the easiest target, they thought as that moron at the CIA said that it was a slam dunk. They went in there and instead of being greeted as liberators as the Vice President told Tim Russert a week before this thing started, they got in there and the thing blew up on him and they have been there three years trying to get out."
MSNBC's Chris Matthews: "Well I am just going to stick to this point that the president led us in there with the background music of American culture. Everybody was led to believe that we were getting payback, we were avenging what happened on 9/11 and that we are going to get them. Vice President Cheney said we are going to attack terrorism at its base. Over and over the language was, this is where it came from, in fact most recently the President suggested that it was always the hot pursuit, like a new York police chase, we chased them back into their country. We pursued the terrorists back to Iraq and it's all nonsense. The reason there are terrorists in Iraq today like Zarqawi is we created the opening by blowing the country apart. From the beginning it's been not true. Now you can't prove motive and you can't prove somebody lies, but from the beginning everything about how they've got WMD's, they are a threat to us, they are going to bomb us with a nuclear weapon, this country is going to be an easy liberate, it's going to be a cake walk. As Cheney said as recently as ten months ago the insurgents are in their last throws. Everything that is said is not true. And right to the end here, here we are now and it's not a civil war and when Allawi the prime Minster is saying it is a civil war and here is the president quoting his own people that it's not a civil war. I mean the denial has been continuous. So you really can't count on the administration to tell you what is going on. That is just the fact. You've got to check it out. By the way, the president said this week that he wants the whole truth about what is going on in Iraq, the whole truth and that the media isn't telling the whole story. I'll tell you what we are not telling. We are not showing pictures of the twenty five hundred bodies coming back because they won't let us show the pictures. They don't want the whole truth out and that's the fact."
NEWS QUOTE OF THE DAY #2
MSNBC's Chris Matthews: "I think the president made a big mistake this week, and maybe I'm the only one that caught it, but when he came out and said he never said that we went to Iraq because of what happened on 9/11, that Saddam was never involved in 9/11, that whole mentality, the whole culture, the country music, everything, was saying this was payback. We are getting them in Iraq because of what they did to us on 9/11, and now they come out and say I never claimed that. Well you know it's in the actual language of when he said to congress, I'm now going to pick you up on that authorization to go to war, but we are going to war tomorrow, this is in 2003 in March, we are going to war tomorrow and the reason we are going is because we are going to get the countries attacked us on 9/11 we are going to get them. He clearly said all along. The Darryl Worley song remember how you felt, and you know all that stuff, the Vice President saying that Saddam was involved in 9/11 again and again. To come out now and say I never said this was payback is B.S."
Imus: "Didn't they actually say, because we were talking about that as well, because the way they left it out... didn't he actually say that they harbored terrorists, and as I pointed out the way that people pay attention to the news, which is not as much as you and I do, it was easy for Americans to infer that he meant... and by the way they did these polls, as you well know, in which the majority of the American people actually thought that the people who flew the airplanes into the World Trade center, the Pentagon and then the field in Pennsylvania actually came from Iraq, so while they didn't specifically say that they said that they harbored terrorists and the implication was... well you are right, but did he actually say that?"
Chris Matthews: "He said in the statement he gave to Congress when he said ok boys we are going to war tomorrow morning, in that statement he said I'm operating under the authorization that allows me to go after organizations or countries that attacked us on 9/11. Many times he said we can't distinguish between the people who attacked us on 9/11, we can't separate the two. The vice president was very clear, continually talking about coordination between the Iraqi intelligence and Muhammad Atta, who was the chief hijacker, it's right there in the tapes, and then Cheney comes out and denies it even though it's right on tape. Remember Gloria Borger interviewed him, I'm not sure if she was CBS at the time, but she interviewed him and he directly lied about it, and said that he did not say that. A number of times we have showed the tape and when he actually said exactly what he was denying on tape, we got the tape of what he was denying."
To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.
belonged in the Washington Post.
As for Box Turtle Boy, it sounds like he didn't plagiarize the Crosswalk music bit, he just copied from himself. Not such a sin.
Other than that, it appears he's rewritten the Led Zeppelin song:
Tryining to save my soul tonight It's everybody's fault but mine
A former editor of Box Turtle Boy wrote in:
Hi --
This all seems to have happened really fast. I hadn't really checked the news til midday today when I saw all of this happened. It might be kind of moot now, but I was Domenech's editor at The Flat Hat when he was writing the reviews. Four people, including me, would have handled his copy, the others being my assistant section editor, the managing editor and the editor.
This should seem obvious, but no one on the editorial staff was going into Salon (or wherever) and pasting whole sections into his reviews. We were more concerned about getting the paper done so we could get home at 2 in the morning instead of 5. We may have put additional words in the story, but it would never have been completely foreign content. It was just editing.
I'm all for the media policing their own and drawing sharper and clearer distinctions between the various hats worn by people, but this is totally unrelated to regulating online activity. Deal with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh before you deal with me (not that I think they should be dealt with by regulation either). They, too, are Media, and can say what they want except for, in Limaugh's case, what the FCC defines as obscenity.
As he often does Vaughn Ververs misses the point. The Post does not have to provide balance in its opinion section any more than the Wall Street Journal does. What the Post should not do is hire a conservative for the purpose of balancing journalists in order to bow to the pressure of conservatives. The former is an editorial decision, the latter is fundamentally dishonest as it tacitly admits something which isn't true.
It's important to remember that to try to keep his job Ben hung his nameless former editor, Jim Brady, Howie Kurtz, and his pals/colleagues at Redstate.org out to dry as they sat there to defend him. The Redstaters have to be pissed, as they don't just see themselves as a blog, but as the nexus of the conservative political movement online. They're even organized as a 527.* They're not going to like having their reputations tarnished. And poor Ticky Tacky Tacitus.
*Correction. They did organize as a 527 but I don't believe they're running under its umbrella.
It's very simple. Stop trying to appease conservatives. You never will. Stop worrying about "bias." Continue worrying about doing good journalism.
I said on Air American just now that if the Post had announced a "Blue America" along with "Red America" Ben's plagiarism likely would've never been discovered. The outrage was over the fact that once again conservatives had succeeded in mau-mauing a mainstream media outlet into balancing reporters with conservatives.
Look, this is all just part of the greatest heist ever imagined. It begins with the attempt to steal the Social Security trust fund. The next step is to allow theft from corporate pension funds. And then finally they'll remove protections from 401(k) funds to allow creditors to take those funds.
Fortunately for Box Turtle he's young enough to recover and rebound from this. I'd like to suggest that this would be just the way to rehab his reputation.
The question which will never be answered is just how Box Turtle Ben got his job at the Post. There was no "Wanted: Blogger" sign posted, and nor were they under any requirement to do so. But, as with all cronyism and wingnut welfare generally, there were connections, and people who knew people, and the general network in place. Young Box Turtle has had good PR from the beginning in Washington circles, as this 2000 article in the Post demonstrates:
At 18, Benjamin Domenech, of Round Hill, has landed himself a plum assignment in the world of inside-the-Beltway journalism. He writes a column, "Any Given Sunday," recapping the political talk television programs for the World Wide Web site of the conservative National Review magazine.
If there was a Top 10 list of young Loudoun County people to watch, he’d be on it. And agree with him or not, you would be hard pressed to deny that Domenech is a sharp writer with an obvious command of his national politics beat–especially considering that this is the first year he is eligible to vote.
"He really shows maturity beyond his years," said Richard Lowry, editor of the National Review.
Lowry said he runs into a lot of George Will-wannabes trying to break into national journalism circles at a very young age, but "few of them can actually pull it off. [Domenech] just seems to be just a couple steps in front of everyone else."
heh indeedy.
Not every 24-year-old college dropout gets to have an opinion column backed by the institutional grandeur of the Washington Post. Note I have nothing against people who lack pieces of paper certifying their completion of formal education, but that doesn't change the fact that given the current rules of the education game such pieces of paper are in fact an entrance requirement for people not named Box Turtle Ben.
It's also important to note that this is all just a continuing trend. Once upon a time newspapers handed out columns to seasoned journalists as an end of career bonus. Then, in part to satisfy screeching wingnuts crying about liberal bias, and in part to save money, they bought up syndication packages of mostly talentless wingnuts with little or no experience in journalism to balance the so-called "liberals" in the op-ed pages. And, as with Froomkin, whatever the "liberal" leanings of the existing columnists, their entire careers were based around a respect for objectivity and balance, for truth and reason, and were in no way part of a "grand liberal movement" the way that the conservative columnists are. In other words, they weren't hacks and propagandists.
I have nothing especially wrong with a bit of hackery, as long as it is fairly honest hackery, but it would never occur to the Post to hire the liberal equivalent of Box Turtle. And the hack gap persists...
Stealing is a sin in Christianity, and plagiarism is stealing. Ben Domenech, the Washington Post's new conservative blogger, tells us that he takes pride in his fundamentalist Christianity, including in a literal belief in the Genesis. This makes me think that he would also take pride in following the ten commandments of Christianity which include the command "Thou Shalt Not Steal".
If this is true he must feel pretty bad right now, given that he has been found to have plagiarized countless pieces of writing, including work that he has published since college years.
Plagiarizing is stealing. It is also lying, because a plagiarist pretends to have written or produced something that is someone else's work. Thus, Domenech appears guilty of both stealing and lying. He believes that his party is the party of moral and ethical values. Well, I guess we have found out what these values mean to him.
Enough sermonizing about this young wingnut. It's time to sermonize about the Washington Post who hired him without using the miraculous Googling tool. Either wingnuts get a free pass in the Post or whoever was supposed to have checked Domenech out was sleeping on the job. Or perhaps the whole thing was designed as a great revenge against the horrible liberal blogosphere. Whatever the explanation, the Post is not smelling very good right now.
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