Further Disgracing Himself

Friday, March 24, 2006

Ben Domenech, the conservative and former blogger at Red America who resigned after being accused of plagiarism, has posted a rebuttal to the charges...well, some a few of them. Sadly, it's mostly him blaming the liberals who tried to bring him down. You can read the entire thing for yourself, but here is just his partial response to some of the plagiarism charges, and they're weak:

I know that charges of plagiarism are serious. While I am not a journalist, I have, myself, written more than one thing that has been plagiarized in the past. But these charges have also served to create an atmosphere where no matter what is said on my Red America blog, leftists will focus on things with my byline from when I was a teenager.

Virtually every other alleged instance of plagiarism that I've seen comes from a single semester's worth of pieces that were printed under my name at my college paper, The Flat Hat, when I was 17.

Since when does being a teenager excuse oneself from plagiarism, or any act for that matter? When conservatives generally have no problem seeing death sentences handed out to criminals for committing acts at 17, certainly someone of the same age caught plagiarizing deserves no pardon.

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.


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.

Well we're certainly not going to believe you!

Conveniently, Mr. Domenech fails to defend his review of "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," a film released not eight years ago but in 2001. His review is almost identical to Steve Murray's of Cox News Service, and I'd like to know if an editor messed with that one too. From Kos; the first paragraph being Domenech's review, the second is Murray's:

Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They're known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human. They are swollen, insectoid, the nightmare descendents of Lovecraftian grotesque - if only the filmmakers had created a plot that was as memorable.

***

Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They're known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within." Swollen nightmares from a petri dish, they're the kind of grotesque whatsits horror writer H.P. Lovecraft would have kept as pets in his basement.

How can you defend that? Well obviously that's a tough task which is why he chose to defend some other charges while ignoring the big ones such as this. Where's the apology? Instead of blaming liberals (though admitted some have taken their attacks too far) he should be manning up to his errors, and we should be thanking the lefties for uncovering a dishonest plagiarizer whom at this point is still refusing to come clean.