What Are They Thinking?

You might well ask. First it was the Los Angeles Times, banishing veteran journalist (but embarrassingly left-leaning) Robert Sheer from his opinion column, and hiring a right wing twerp to replace him.

Now it's the Washington Post, adding red meat to its online presence with a rabid right blogger and former Smirk-appointed whiz kid, Ben Domenech. Imitator of the increasingly tired and reliably rancid hyperbole and mendacity which is the rabid right's contribution to discourse, it turns out he is more than an Ann Coulter wannabe. Southpaw blogs have found multiple instances of gross plagarism. I mean word for word stuff, from established publications like salon and--get this--the Washington Post. And we're apparently not talking about blog entries where he neglected to close quotation marks, but movie reviews and other signed pieces he represented in non-blog publications as his own. They weren't.

What happens now? Media Matters, bloggers at dKos , Booman Trib and elsewhere are calling for not only his head but the head of Jim Brady, the WaPo online editor who hired him. So is salon columnist Joe Conason.

It's worth noting that the Post has no left-leaning opinion blogger. Dan Froomkin is their on-line columnist who gets heat for his stinging analyses of the Smirk's regime and press gooniness, but he is an actual journalist, and his columns include sources and links.

What's going on? These papers weathered the worst of the "liberal bias" mantra years, and now when every sane person with a sensory array realizes that it's a rabid right Big Lie, they start caving. Or is it that newspapers feel compelled to ape Faux News even after CNN and MSNBC have proven what a stupid fruitless fruit-loopy strategy that is?

But while the blogosphere may take awhile for them to figure out, the charge of plagarism is something that yon high editors understand. Plagarism is a print sin. And as they may have now figured out, it is also a blogosphere sin, which other bloggers enforce.

I saw in comments somewhere that a pool is in the offing---on which heads roll and how soon. Smart money when is late Friday, when all the good stuff politicians want to hide tends to happen. No doubt a newspaper looking at the circulation of its Saturday editions will figure that out.

P.S. dKos was down for awhile so I've only now gotten to read all the comments and the newer diaries on this situation. I still think the Post online has to own up to this by accepting his resignation and that of the person responsible for not vetting him. The kid himself, I'm beginning to feel a little compassion for. (Yeah, the great liberal weakness.) His plagarism, mostly in his college paper but also in the National Review and elsewhere, and another situation where he may have made up a quote and then covered it up, is so self-subverting that it's like an unconscious cry to be discovered as not the faultless wonderkind everybody says, or everybody expects. There is no way such obvious and persistent plagarism could have gone undetected in the long run. That feeling of inferority often goes hand in hand with apparent self-confidence, the mask of arrogance that even he may believe.

Well, before this becomes even more amateur psychologizing, another observation: I've noted before that the rabid right has been very good at identifying young up and comers (especially those vulnerable to their flattery and their ideological certainties), supporting them with money and jobs, getting them quickly into their power networks and giving them responsibility. Democrats have not done this nearly as well, not at least since the weakening of the labor unions.

But the downside of this is now apparent. Young ideologues have been put in very responsible positions in the Bush government and elsewhere, where they are in way over their heads, and have done and are doing considerable damage to the country, the world and the future. Now it appears that at least one has done a lot of damage to himself.

UPDATE: Ben Domenech resigned on, um, Friday afternoon.