SEE UPDATE BELOW BEFORE READING

After first defending himself at RedState in what I will charitably call a curious fashion, Mr. Domenech has finally come clean and done the right thing:

I want to apologize to National Review Online, my friends and colleagues here at RedState, and to any others that have been affected over the past few days. I also want to apologize to my previous editors and writers whose work I used inappropriately and without attribution. There is no excuse for this – nor is there an excuse for any obfuscation in my earlier statement.

I hope that nothing I’ve done as a teenager or in my professional life will reflect badly on the movement and principles I believe in.

I’m deeply grateful for the love and encouragement of all those around me. And although I may not deserve such support, it makes it that much more humbling at a time like this. I’m a young man, and I hope that in time that I can earn a measure of the respect that you have given me.

I was unaware of Mr. Domenech’s enormous talent as a writer as evidenced in this piece he did for the New York Press:

I walked out of the bright Friday sun and into the Capitol Bldg.’s Document Entrance two hours before the gunman arrived. The back of my collar scratched sweat against my skin, and I loosened my tie in a vain effort to find relief from the sultry July heat. I remember nodding hello to the tall black policeman who was standing at the metal detector in front of the Document Entrance door. I don’t remember if he smiled back. From what friends tell me now, he usually did.

At 3:40 that July afternoon, Russell Weston Jr. stepped into the air conditioning of the Capitol Bldg. through that same door. He took five short steps across the tiles to where the officer on duty, 58-year-old J.J. Chestnut, was writing down directions for a group of tourists who had just finished the official tour. Weston raised his gun with speed and silence and put a .38-caliber bullet through the back of Chestnut’s head.

I don’t care whether you’re right wing, left wing, or a chicken wing, if you can’t recognize that the boy plays music with words there’s something wrong with you. And this makes his word thefts all the more mystifying. Plagiarism is the crime of hacks, those of little talent and an indolent nature whose imagination and vision are as limited as their intellectual acumen. When someone blessed with such obvious gifts gives in to temptation like Mr. Domenech now admits he did, there must be other reasons than simple laziness.

In the heart of every artist, there is a gnawing sense of inadequacy, a belief that at bottom, they are just not good enough to deserve the plaudits and encomiums they receive from their peers and the public. In one respect, this makes many artists insufferable louts as they seek to cover this inadequacy with bluster and braggadocio. But in a more uplifting aspect of this phenomena, it drives the artist to excel. Writing, being part artistic endeavor and part journeyman’s craft, opens itself to practitioners who exemplify the best of creativity while requiring the attitude of a bricklayer. Carefully laying down ideas in a logical and coherent fashion (if indeed that is the writer’s goal) can be a chore at times and it is this facet of the craft that can be irksome.

That irritation can lead to temptation, a desire to shortcut the process by not re-inventing the wheel. There is also the unwritten rule that a nice turn of the phrase or a play on words can be copied and pasted – a curious form of flattery of which I have been guilty in the past (use the site search here to look for references to “dirty necked galoots” which I first saw used by R. Emmett Tyrell). Put it all together and plagiarism becomes an easy trap to fall into unless one is firmly grounded with a strict moral sense and strong ethical standards.

Jeff Goldstein, who for some reason has recently come under attack by some pretty heavy hitters on the left for…well, being Goldstein, I guess, places the imbroglio in context:

Having met Ben last month, I can report that I found him to be a very bright, very articulate, very glib young man. He is also a very gifted writer. On the charges of plagiarism, I’ll accept Ben’s explanation—whatever it is—because I also found him to be quite a forthright gentleman, which means that I expect he will admit to any wrongdoing.

What is most distasteful about this episode from the perspective of the blogosphere, on the other hand, is the palpable glee with which many on the left set out after Ben and are now luxuriating in his resignation. And, of course, they have taught the WaPo the lesson they wished to teach it: that rightwing commentary will be scrutinized in direct inverse to the acceptance they give to the obvious biases of leftwing media figures.

There has been a concerted effort by the left in the past year to try and knock down the idea that there is a liberal bias in major media. In fact, liberals are attempting to portray the media as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the GOP and conservatives. They believe if they say “Rush Limbaugh” and “Fox News” often enough and loud enough, people will actually start believing that Chris Matthews is a conservative masquerading as former Chief of Staff to Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill or that Katie Couric is a closet Republican.

This from the Reality Based Community.

The furious reaction by left wing blogs to the very idea of a page on the Washington Post website devoted to conservatives represents a recognition by the left that their once total dominance of the flow of information (and hence the power to set the national agenda) is under serious challenge. And as Goldstein points out, the next conservative blogger hired by the Post better have a thick skin:

Because make no mistake: their entire schtick has become political theater—and often of the most hateful variety. In recent months, we’ve seen a ratcheting up of attempts to undermine the credibility of writers who don’t toe the progressive line (for my part, I’ve been called an idiot, a failed academic, a pill-popping hausfrau, untalented, uncreative, pretentious etc., etc.). But of course, it’s the right who engages in the “politics of personal destruction.” That’s just, well, an established given.

Ben Domenech is not Dan Rather; but no matter. The scalp is the thing. And the left has theirs today.

Which brings us to a double standard on the left so unfair, so obvious that one can easily question the personal integrity of people who perpetrate it, as Goldstein does here:

[T]hose on the left who have been braying all day over Ben’s downfall have two choices, as I see it: they can continue to gloat and carry around his scalp as a trophy to their own viciousness (they went after him for a host of other things, from his schooling to his family to his supposed “racism” before they got around to the plagiarism charge)—showing themselves to be the very fetishists of schadenfreude I accused them of being; or they can now explain to us why they don’t hold their own to the same ethical standards. Ben has owned up to his mistakes. He has, as I anticipated he would, taken that most difficult first step to rehabilitating his credibility. Now it’s time for other folks to do the same: Molly Ivins; Larry Tribe; Stephen Ambrose; Dan Rather; Jason Leopold; Joe Biden; Micah Wright; Ward Churchill; Eason Jordan; CNN’s agreement with Saddam’s Iraq; Joe Wilson; Steve Erlanger—we’re looking at you.

Surely, our principled guardians of publishing ethics could use their newfound momentum to prompt similarly intensive investigations into the ethical lapses of those mentioned above, yes? Or is it only conservatives who are to be publicly pilloried by the reality based community.

You know—because of the nuance.

Ever so slowly, the attack memes carefully knitted together by the left over the past 3 long years to form a devastating narrative that puts the President in the most evil, unflattering light are unravelling before our eyes. The Saddam documents promise to do what thousands of right wing bloggers could never do; change the tone and tenor of the debate over the Iraq War (and thus the President) by giving the lie to all of the myths, half-truths, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods perpetrated by hateful, spiteful, jealous liberals whose irritation at losing elections has reached the point that they will do anything and say anything, even to the point of bringing shame and humiliation to the United States, in order to achieve power.

Yes, they brought down a conservative blogger. But later this summer, as the revelations continue about not only Saddam but the conspiracy involving our erstwhile allies against our efforts at both the UN and on the battlefield in Iraq becomes more generally known, the decision by Democrats and the netroots to make the election about George W. Bush could very well seem in retrospect to be a blunder of monumental proportions.

UPDATE

My jaw is on the floor and I am royally pissed off.

After Anne informed me in the comments that the piece I linked to from the New York Press above was actually cribbed from an article from the Washington Post I initiated a search of lefty blogs and sure enough, Domenech had copied almost word for word a piece that appeared in the Post on July 26, 1998 on page one!

It appears that my praise for Mr. Domenech was given for a piece in which he had lifted large segments of someone else’s beautiful work and claimed it as his own.

I apologize to my readers for 1)implying that Ben Domenech has any proven talent, and 2) misleading them about the author of the piece I linked above.

Domenech has come far and fast in life. It is apparent that he took many shortcuts to reach the height from which he has now fallen. It is also apparent from reading RedState and Jeff Goldstein that he has many friends who care about him and will stand by him in his hour of trial. This is a good thing because judging by the sheer volume of work in which he has shamelessly stolen others ideas and words, he will never write professionally again. And anyone who would hire him as a writer is a fool.

BTW - as of 7:00 PM Central on Saturday night, the list of plagiarized cites at Daily Kos are 7 pages long in MS Word.