The Brief Rise and Quick Fall of Ben Domenech

The Washington Post's online arm, blog.washingtonpost.com last week decided to expand their readership and hire a rabid conservative. Their choice for this noble purpose was a young, home-schooled former speechwriter named Ben Domenech. Three days after his first post, he resigned due to allegations of plagiarism.

A brief synopsis of the furor in the blogosphere was published on Editor and Publisher. And the entire run of Benny's column can, at the moment, be found here. Three days, six posts (seven, if you count his self-aggrandizing bio), and a resignation notice from the editor.

During those three days, left-leaning bloggers everywhere went digging through his earlier writing, and turned up ample evidence that Benny wasn't always as original as he could have been, and often had a difficult time with that elusive concept, "the truth." Atrios discovered that Spinsanity had mentioned him - by name - for lying, back in 2002. His fascinating point of view was trotted out into the open, as was his taste in movies. And Talking Points Memo actually managed to link him to Jack Abramoff. By the time they were done, even the equally-rabid Michelle Malkin couldn't back away from this kid fast enough.

Under his RedState.com pen name, "Augustine," Benny wrote a relatively pissy retrospective of his brief mainstream-blogging career, wherein he explained "I am a conservative, not a partisan," among other fascinating insights into his attitude toward the truth. One of the excuses he offered for, in this case, plagiarizing P.J. O'Rourke, is as follows:

But the truth is that I had met P.J. at a Republican event and asked his permission to do a college-specific version of his classic piece on partying. He granted permission, the piece was cleared with my editors at the paper, and it ran as inspired by O'Rourke's original.

Strangely enough, if you do a little research and dig up the article in question, nowhere does it mention P.J. O'Rourke, nor does it reference his book "Modern Manners," the source of Benny's column.

Let's compare. Here's Ben Domenech, from his Flat Hat article:

Real parties vary tremendously in type and style, but I've noticed they all share certain things in common.

- Real parties don't start until after midnight. - No friendships or romantic relationships should survive a real party fully intact.
- Neither should much furniture.
- Someone should be wearing undergarments on his head by 2 a.m.
- By 3 a.m., someone should have called the police.
- Someone else should have called George Bush long distance to invite him over.

And here's P.J. O'Rourke, from Modern Manners:

Real parties vary tremendously in type and style, but all share certain things in common.

- Real parties don't start until after midnight.
- No friendships or romantic relationships should survive a real party fully intact.
- Neither should much furniture.
- Someone should have underpants on his head by 2 a.m.
- By 3 a.m., someone should have called the police.
- Someone else should have called George Bush long distance to invite him over.

I see the difference: Benny added "I've noticed" in the first line, and used "undergarments" instead of "underpants." It's a completely different bit. (That's called the "Vanilla Ice defense" - claiming that a single changed note at the end of a line made "Ice Ice Baby" entirely different from David Bowie and Queen's song "Under Pressure.")

The Flat Hat, the student newspaper of William and Mary College, where Ben got his extra-domiciliary education, was the source of many of the plagiarized articles in question. The Flat Hat editors refuted Benny's claim that they were either complicit with or responsible for Domenech's plagiarism.

So many examples of Domenech's repeated acts of literary theft were turned up that only one question is left. In the bio on his deceased WaPo blog, we find the following statement:

Ben is now a book editor for Regnery Publishing, where he has edited multiple bestsellers and books by Michelle Malkin, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Hugh Hewitt.

So you have to ask yourself: what are Regnery's standards, and how do they feel about plagiarism?