Rip, Mix, and Blog?

Unsurprisingly, the lefty blogosphere have been making like piranhas at Ben Domenech, the conservative wünderkind recently hired by The Washington Post to author the new RedAmerica blog. Much of the outrage has been over the fact that the guy the Post hired as their house blog-conservative holds views that are, in fact, conservative. More unsettling, though, is evidence uncovered by Atrios that Domenech may be some sort of serial plagiarist: See examples one (also partially borrowed from here), two, three, and four.

Addendum: Domenech's bio says he's written for us, though I did a quick Google and Nexis search and can't find anything. It might be something that's not on the site, though our archives go back to what would've been his early teens, so I don't know what's up with that—but it's entirely possible that's just a lacuna in our archives.

Second Addendum: A 2000 profile of Domenech in the Post notes that he began freelancing at 15 and had accumulated a pile of clips before even reaching college, and Nexis doesn't turn up a bunch of my stuff for Reason either, so it's entirely plausible that whatever he wrote for us does just precede our archives. Anyway, the point was meant to be: Full disclosure, Ben may have written for us; read whatever I write about this with that in mind.

Last One: One Kos diarist is trying to keep a comprehensive list of suspect pieces and passages, of which only a few are linked above. Also, Domenech emails to say whatever he wrote for us was something very short (sounds like maybe a Citing?) in the late 90s, so it's probably just something that never got archived with a proper byline.