Sorry, not buying it any more than I buy, "I don't know how the entry for the SEP got into my paper. I must have copied and pasted it in there and wrote connecting sentences around it by mistake."
I know. I mean, suppose O'Rourke heard "can I update your old party piece?" He probably didn't interpret this to mean "change the name at the top and leave the other bits the same."
I can't decide what bothers me more: (a) that we're supposed to be convinced by the shoddy explanations offered, or (b) that people on his side actually are convinced by such explanations. Either way, not good.
3: pretty depressing, that. Sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
I link to this source only because I believe it's the only place that hasn't yet written about how they'd like to rape my sister.
Dammit, I knew there was an angle to this story that we were missing. Nobody here even thought to write that. We are totally losing our edge.
She is kinda cute.
[On second thought, I've redacted the link. JM is right. If you're disappointed, you can google it as easily as I did. -'r]
The comments by his supporters are just surreal. They blame his critics for making up facts, for ignoring reality, for not accepting his excuses for violations that are obvious to anyone with one eye. (Even Michelle Malkin agreed that Ben was wrong, and she was then attacked in the comments as becoming too moonbat-like!). Project much?
It's like these people are trying to use Jedi mind tricks in real life. I wonder if they really believe in that- "I wasn't speeding, officer- you must be looking for another driver" as they wave their hands.
5. Apo, I've just been bashing someone about the head on ObWi for a cruder version of the same. Most regulars know this is the light-hearted, decent-minded paedophilia and bestiality cokjoke blog, but I do hate to see anyone's family villified or threatened for his or her writing. My comedy career is still not going very well. On a lighter note, I do know how many feminists it takes to screw in a lightbulb.
Hits from the comment section:
***
If you are anything like what you have been accused of then JB was an incompetent fool to hire you and did both of you a great disservice.
Your graciousness proves your worth and contrasts to the hypocrisy of the piranhanic mob.
They are stained with your blood. Rise! and Redeem! You need not champion yourself for yourself but there is a triumph that awaits you.
[I don't really know what I am saying here, but I have some poetic instinct about justice arising from injustice,and the birth of a champion. At any rate...may you meet with good fortune].
***
In combat great people (we call them heros) sometimes get injured and have to be withdrawn. Before you (and your family and the Post) were further injured you were able to drag yourself away from the battlefield.
In Christendom great people (we call them martyrs) stand for truth and get killed for it. Your voice in a dark world was a threat to the darkness and it felt compelled to silence you.
At RedState we have great people (we call them family) who yearn for truth, love of country, and a philosophy that we are all in this epic struggle together.
I am proud to have you as a RedState brother. Your RedState family is with you while you pick yourself up, brush of the dirt, and ready yourself to get back to battle. If you could forgive me for offering you advice in such a rough time; consider a vacation. The rest would do you some good.
***
Apostropher, you are the greatest of all America's heros.
In Journalism, people (we call them idiots) plagiarise and get fired for it.
At best, the kid is an unprincipled dupe. I'm sorry, if when writing movie reviews for a paper, I noticed that the editors time and time again inserted whole works from other authors into my writing, I would do something to deny the by-lines or something. Not use it to get myself a job.
The truth seems so clear. I'll write it for him.: "When I was a freshman assigned to write movie review for The Flat Hat, I was woefully underprepared, and I knew it. Eager to make a good impression, and I regretfully crossed the line separating mere imitation of real movie critics into appropriating piece of their work and incorporating it into my own.
As I matured as a writer and a journalist, I developed my own style, and as even my critics will note, all of those corrupt pieces are from my very early days as a public writer, youthful mistakes which unfortunately remain burnished into Google's memory years after the indiscretions were committed."
Is #11 (and #1, for that matter) another one of your jokes that I'm not fast enough to get, Cala? I don't think anyone believes his explanations.
11 is what I would recommend poor Ben to say; apologetic, attempt to put it in the past, minimize it as a youthful mistake.
1 is an indication that I think his story -- that his editors put the plagiarized writings into his stories -- makes about as much sense as the student that told me that the "DESCARTES (b. 1504) believed..." in his paper was just a formatting error and not at all copied from anywhere.
Hey, it's SomeCallMeTim! I think we were pretending on a FreeRepublic thread the other day. Fun times!
Oops. Should read: pretending to be conservatives together on a FreeRepublic thread. I hope I don't get us busted!
#15: To be honest, that's someone else. I've never commented at Free Republic. Or I inhabit some sort of PKD universe.
Really? That's incredibly strange. I knew I recognized the name from some liberal blogs, and I checked through the other SCMT's posts and they seemed subversive.
I guess it must be a reference to some book I've never read or song I've never heard?
18: Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail
I haven't seen that movie since I was a teenager.. and it shows!
7: You're right. I took out the link.
The main problem is, to go out with a bit of class you had to have had some to start off with. That lot picked the wrong champion; I'm just a little surprised more of them haven't turned on him yet.
Thing is, by RedState standards that sign-off was the epitome of taste, restraint and decorum. The guy frothing about how liberals are mere beasts with the power of speech is, by those same standards, being slightly saucy and should maybe tone things down a little.
RedState of course see themselves as the cream of right-wing commentary. Many of those who were shrieking about Ben's treatment at the hands of the leftist hordes pointed out that he kept out what they call the "evilcons," because they were too hateful to post on RedState.
I've been peppering the thread with unattributed Nixon aphorisms and extended quotes from the resignation speech.
How juvenile.
If our past experience is any indication, Ben Domenech should be showing up and commenting here any minute now.
They are stained with your blood. Rise! and Redeem! You need not champion yourself for yourself but there is a triumph that awaits you.
Is this some kind of house style? Why do they all sound like Jack Kirby doing his famous John C. Calhoun impression?
Or something. Man, what a fucking martyr complex.
It's like shaking a magic 8-ball filled with sayings from Lord of the Rings, the Second Coming, and Highlander. For a 24 year old 'conservative' whose track record now soley consists in being a plagiarist.
Hope this wakes him up. He's young enough to make good in a career.
Hope this wakes him up. He's young enough to make good in a career.
Cala, you're crazy. This is not a big deal for young Ben. Think about Charles Colson. Or the Administration officials that were indicted during Iran-Contra. This is nothing. Hell, Bork fired Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre, and he was nominated to the Supreme Court for his trouble.
At worst, this is a slightly smaller feather in young Benjamin's cap.
My critics have also accused me of plagiarism in multiple movie reviews for the college paper. I once caught an editor at the paper inserting a line from The New Yorker (which I read) into my copy and protested. When that editor was promoted, I resigned. Before that, insertions had been routinely made in my copy, which I did not question. I did not even at that time read the publications from which I am now alleged to have lifted material. When these insertions were made, I assumed, like most disgruntled writers would, that they were unnecessary but legitimate editorial additions.
But all these specifics are beside the point. Considering that all of this happened almost eight years ago, and that there are no files or notes that I've kept from that brief stint, it is simply my word against the liberal blogosphere on these examples. It becomes a matter of who you believe.
Colson & the Iran-Contra folks, while liars, etc, had done other honorable things with their lives, though, or at least they had a longer record of doing important things before they were caught.
This kid, what? He's known as a writer who made good by relying on family connections though failing to finish college, and everyone could pretend it was due to his talent except that now it seems his talent was plagiarized.
People can bounce back from tough shit, but it helps if they're actually somebody first. North had how many military honors before he fouled up/was scapegoated?
I imagine he'll bounce back; daddy can always buy these kids another job, but I'm hoping he realizes he got lucky if he does.
Cala:
I think you vastly overestimate the importance of stains on one's integrity. Lots and lots of people will be willing to overlook his plagiarism, in no small part because they have cut similar corners to get where they were. Stephen Glass got a book deal, and then a movie deal. There's some guy in Slate who wrote a story admitting that he was a recovering heroin addict. He still writes for them. I seem to recall that West Point failed an entire class a few years ago because of a cheating scandal; I'm sure they were just the first ones to get caught.
It speaks well of you, though.
I wouldn't worry about Ben. 20 years from now he'll be serving in some Bush adminstration. Maybe that hispanic Bush nephew, what's his name.
SCMT, perhaps, but his career path probably won't be in journalism. Maybe policy. [Cause you don't need integrity there! *rimshot]
North had how many military honors before he fouled up/was scapegoated?
Four, according to wikipedia: silver star, bronze star, and two purple hearts.
Then he lied to congress, under oath, to cover up a criminal conspiracy in which he was a knowing and intentional participant. He conspired to violate federal law by improperly selling US property and using the money to aid certain insurgents/terrorists. Congress had specifically forbidden the use of any US money for that purpose. On television he described this illegal misuse of government property as "a neat idea."
At the time he was a 42 year old Lieutenant Colonel on the staff of the National Security Council. For those brave actions to support the valiant freedom fighters whom a craven congress denied assistance in their struggle against a socialist government, and his steadfastness in managing to sell 1,000 anti-tank missiles to Ayatollah Khomeini despite overwhelming opposition to any arms sales to Iran, some Democrats view him as less than a staunch defender of the US Constitution.
I apologize, I should have just let this be, but it's an important bit of history. Yes, North was scapegoated, in the sense that Reagan should have been impeached and imprisoned. But no, he is fairly reviled for his part in a blatantly unconstitutional and illegal operation. He had all the training on refusing illegal orders, I'm sure, and he choose to obey those orders anyway. He is a slimy, self-righteous, lying SOB. Much like the SOBs running foriegn policy now.
This, I suspect, was not easy to write. Good for him.
Or simply the smallest admission he could make in the face of overwhelming evidence. I assume someone took him aside and said, "Say sorry - they've got too much on you to keep obfuscating."
That's of course possible. Also possible is that once he stopped lying to himself about what he had done, he saw that an admission of guilt and an apology to his editors, defenders, and the writers he plagiarized from was the beginning his responsibility.
RE 42
It is good that he finally did a real apology.
This, I suspect, was not easy to write.
If he wrote it.
And if the point of my analogy had been that North wasn't slimy....
All I was saying, and I thought it was pretty clear that that is what I did say, is that one's ability to bounce back from a scandal, as North & Colson have, depend partially on one's track record before the scandal broke, and in that, I think Domenech isn't in nearly as good a position as North or Colson. (And neither North nor Colson returned to their original jobs.)
Hmm. He apologized. Good for him. Would have been better if that had been his first response rather than his tenth, but better late than never.
baa, you're kidding me, right? It's an admission of wrongdoing made only after the wrongdoing is made completely obvious, and when people in the comments are repeatedly calling him on the charges he didn't address in his "the editors made me do it." Great. After a few days he stopped lying through his teeth. Gold star!
Gotta agree with Labs. The "apology" quite strikes me as the sort of thing, say, the other three editors of the site might tell him he needed to write following his prior non-apology if he wished to remain a part of the community.
I've been through this script before. Plagiarism accusations are usually followed by an attempt to feel out the possibility of denial (it's useful to keep some of the evidence in the back pocket for this reason); if that goes nowhere, it's "I'm such a bad person, I'm so sorry." You would think that there'd be some cognitive dissonance involved in putting these two gambits side-by-side, but experience doesn't bear that out.
depend partially on one's track record before the scandal broke, and in that, I think Domenech isn't in nearly as good a position as North or Colson. (And neither North nor Colson returned to their original jobs.)
Cala - I think any disagreement I have with your analysis stems from our different characterization of the industry the relevant person is in. You might say that Colson was a lawyer, and no longer is one. I would say that Colson was a Republican operative and remains one. You might say that Domenech was a journalist, and is unlikely to be one again. I would say that Domenech is a Republican operative, and that he will continue to be one in the future. In my scenario, neither Colson nor Domenech was caught doing something wrong per his job; each was, rather, doing his job. The only shame involved is the shame of having been caught. Not such a terrible thing. Feathers for caps all around. (Did you read the Rick Perlstein HuffPost piece. ? It's part of what makes me cynical about how much the conservative movement is likely to care about Domenech's pecadillos. That and descriptions of what goes on in campaigns for the various offices in the Young Republicans organization.)
North is arguably a harder case, but Gawd knows he's a Republican operative today.
Colson had to go through a big public conversion to evangelical Christianity, though, and North had the very nice scapegoat/honorable man taking a fall while Doing What Was Right mythos built up almost immediately.
I don't think our disagreement is serious, and I'm certainly not to believe panglossian pollyanna-ish nonsense that Cheaters Never Win or The Truth Always Outs or Love Conquers All. I just think the claims of his supporters comparing him to Christ in Gethsemane could just use a taste of a baseball bat. This isn't him being tested by fire to prove the gold in his mettle.
And ditto to FL. It's like that shock denial bargaining anger acceptance thing, but with plagiarism it tends to go denial blame bargain minimize apologize.
I didn't mean to give Domenech a gold star. Rather, I thought his apology was the first step in what could be a decent human response. Sure, it could be insincere.
When Domenech finally apologized, it was after he found that some of his fellow wingers were offended. He never would have apologized to us.
His career as a journalist hopefully is ended. Because he was a loyal and combative Republican operative with connections, he'd been promoted far beyond anything his talents, experience, and training could possibly have justified. His career as a Republican hack hasn't even been interrupted, however. He'll land on his feet; he's like a commando who undertook a dangerous mission and got shot.
The guy was a vicious infighter and the objections to the mean way he was treated by The Left are silly.
The most objectionable thing about the whole story was the way that a thuggish political movement almost succeeded in installing a political commissar at the Washington Post. Jonah Goldberg at the LA Times is a similiar story, and they got away with that one. Goldberg is not qualified for his position.
Fontana,
Exactly. Certainly, what he wrote trying to wriggle out of the crime was far worse than the originial plagiarism: blaming his editors was an ignoble act. But it's not like this guy can never redeem himself. The apology was a start, let's hope he continues on that path.
John Emerson,
"Objections to the mean way he was treated by THe Left are silly."
Can you really mean this? Stipulate that in fact people did make personal attacks, threats of violence, aspersions against his family. You really think this no big deal because he's a political "operative." I understand you hate the Bush administration, but does that mean all standards go out the window?
Well, threats of violence are right out, AFAIC. But everything else seems fine. Domenech's of the Ambramoff/Norquist species that talks of taking bats to our heads, and kicking us to death when we're down.
And really, threats of violence are out only as a tip to our greater decency.
baa, for what it's worth, Domenech regularly calls the left traitors and his commenters crow about being thrilled if 'the left' keeled over dead. It's not like he's a voice of measured conservative debate that writes carefully. He's a wee polemicist, and he's set about pissing people off and it seems to me that 95% of it is schadenfreud.
That said, violence and threats are out. But I haven't seen those linked (and mostly read ObWi). I've heard of them referred to, of course, but I also heard 'people accused Ben of copulating with his mother' which is lameass speak for 'they called him 'motherfucker', I shall interpret it literally and pretend to be deeply offended at the incestuous implications..' The person who made rude comments about his sister on ObWi was immediately shouted down.
Ben plays the martyr a bit too much. And he's pulling a cool bait & switch here. 5% of commenters made violent and inappropriate comments, say. 95% were uncivil and rude a standard of discourse he normally accepts. He doesn't get to complain about that 5% while pretending that it's representative of 95% of the sample.
I'm sure that the whiners were able to scavenge up a few people who went over the line -- the kind of stuff you've been able to find fresh by the pound at Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, the Rottweiler, etc., any day of the year for the last twenty years.
I spent a fair amount of time on the Domenech threads and saw one or two signs that maybe something like that had happened, though the posts had been deleted or altered by the time I got there.
I'm not going to stipulate anything. I'm not going to agree that "The Left" is responsible for scattered offensive posts by individuals, and I'm not going to agree that there were a lot of those offensive posts. What people were really whining about was the fact that Domenech's career was ruined. Well, his journalistic career should have been ruined, though I fear that it was not. His operative career may not have been damaged at all; usually they just shift these guys to different venues to start over again.
I doubt that Ben's own civility standards are any higher than his originality standards or his professional ethics.
I understand that you love our cowboy president with a deep and abiding love, but why don't you express your affections in private? That "Bush-hater" cliche is bullshit.
I understand that you love our cowboy president with a deep and abiding love, but why don't you express your affections in private? That "Bush-hater" cliche is bullshit.
That seems like too much, Emerson. Baa's been a good guy, even after the intemperate things some (okay, I) have said about Bush supporters and the rest.
Actually, looking at it, I can't really make sense of your criticism. Baa's looks like, "Does your anger at the Administration allow you to ignore civility codes that I know you would normally observe?" That seems like a reasonable question, though I admit that the phrasing comes out badly.
I smell straw. Not from you, baa, but from the RedState contingent.
Stipulate that in fact people did make personal attacks, threats of violence
Well, we can stipulate it, but I'd much rather see some actual evidence of it. Threats of violence would be beyond the pale, but I have yet to see even one instance of a threat of violence, except in the RedState comments aimed at the amorphous Left (and I don't take those at all seriously).
Personal attacks? On the internet? Clutch the pearls! It isn't his status as a political operative that makes me roll my eyes at this, it's the fact that his stock and trade has been "odious personal attacks." Cry me a river, Augustine.
Civility comes up whenever one poster on one leftwing site goes over the line, or whenever Ward Churchill says something awful.
I gave up on civility during the 1994 campaign, when Tom DeLay claimed that Sharon Smith murdered her own kids because of the Democrats. Not only was this ghoulish, and not only was there no logic or reason behind it, but Smith came from a Republican family and had been molested by her stepfather, who happened to be a Republican official.
DeLay's punishment was to become Speaker of the House. People tut-tutted for a few days, but he was never called on his utterly creepy smear. He finally got burned on other creepiness a few years later, but he remains one of the most powerful men in the world.
It didn't bother the media and it didn't bother the Republicans, who were too busy gloating about taking back the House. I imagine a few Democrats whimpered a little.
The Republican creepiness doesn't come from Ward Churchill or from fringe commenters on the net. It comes from major, influential figures, and it keeps on happening. And that's why I will never pay any atention to a Republican's complaints about incivility.
Tim, I escalated a little, but baa's little dig about "Bush-hating" was pretty stupid. My original post didn't deserve that.
Ben's claiming that people were e-mailing him vicious personal attacks. I'm not really sympathetic. First, I have to believe these 'attacks' were more than 'hahaha you suck how do you like it republican motherfucker', which while childish, like apo said, this is the internet, and hardly a game Ben was above.
But to believe his testimony I have to trust Ben to be a truth-teller, and at the point he made those claims, his response to charges of plagiarism had been to blame it on his editors (who were probably liberal and trying to set him up) and say that O'Rourke gave him permission.
Not the most reliable of narrators.
Tom DeLay claimed that Sharon Smith murdered
That was actually Newt Gingrich, who appears to be running for president now.
Soryy, yeah, Gingrich. They all look the same to me.
Gingrich is the one with the freakishly huge head.
And Tom DeLay is the one who thinks that Baylor and Texas A&M are heathen, godless institutions.
Sorry John, I didn't mean to be insulting. And I agree that allusions to gaseous entities like "The Left" are almost always bogus. On the point, I take it that your answer to my question (nicely rephrased by SCMT) is "yes, I do not think it necessary to observe the standards of civility I would normally hold when dealing with republicans/conservatives, but this has nothing to do with any feelings about the current administration, and, in fact, predates it."
Apostropher, Cala:
Whether or not it's true what Domenech claims: well, he certainly has given sufficient reason to doubt him.
Preach to the Republicans, baa. People have been telling Democrats about civility all along, and they've been listening, unfortunately.
Domenech's calling Coretta King a Communist on the day of her funeral suggests to me that he is exactly the kind of Republican I'm thinking about.
Now I think I'll just trot along to the meeting where we Democrats make plans to condemn your daughters and granddaughters to dhimmitude.
Yeah, unfortunately, civility has been definitively shown to be a losing strategy in national politics. The Dems need to fire all their current consultants and hire some tough, nasty sons of bitches who aren't afraid to swing for the nuts every single time. The GOP has shown it will smear anybody. Time to play by their rules.