Ben, We Hardly Knew Ye

It looks like the Washington Post had better stand up and pay attention to the Ben Domenech scandal now that Salon's Joe Conason is on their case in a piece titled, "A portrait of the blogger as a young plagiarist". It's all over but the firing or the standard "Ben resigned in order to spend more time with his family" excuse.

Stick a fork in Ben. He's done.

Joe writes:

March 24, 2006 | Does the Washington Post intend to maintain journalistic standards in the brave new blogosphere? Or are those standards incompatible with the Post company's ambitions for WashingtonPost.com?
...
Almost immediately the liberal blogosphere exploded with outrage over Domenech's hiring by the Post. But by Thursday bloggers had more than ideological reasons to oppose the Post's move, as Atrios, Daily Kos and other sites uncovered brazen examples of plagiarism by Domenech when he was writing for a student weekly at the College of William and Mary. Ironically, the young right-winger was apparently fond of Salon's arts criticism, at least, because he plagiarized film critic Stephanie Zacharek, and Mary Elizabeth Williams, writing about television.

Neither Domenech nor Post editors replied to requests for comment, and as of this writing, it's not clear whether those plagiarism revelations will be enough to end the right-wing blogger's MSM career. His defenders may say Domenech was only a college student when he made those mistakes. But there's at least one instance in his post-college career when the blogger was accused of another major ethical breach -- a charge that he fabricated a quote by "Meet The Press" host Tim Russert back in June 2002, in an attempt to get his hero, President Bush, out of a political jam...

Read the rest.

There's no way Domenech is going to survive this one and WaPo has a lot of explaining to do.

If he does resign, here's my guess about what his resignation letter will say:

I am not a crook.