Saturday, March 25, 2006

Moral Superiority

Once again, a prominent conservative demonstrates his moral and ethical superiority. This from yesterday's Daily Kos:


Washington Post's Jim Brady: He Can't Google, So He Should Be Replaced
by DHinMI
Fri Mar 24, 2006 at 10:50:09 PM PDT

Poor Jim Brady, sharp people like Brad DeLong give him lots of clues, but Brady chooses to remain clueless:

A 24-year-old blogger for The Washington Post, Ben Domenech, resigned yesterday after being confronted with evidence that he had plagiarized articles in other publications.

His resignation came after writing six blog items in the three days he worked for Red America, a blog that The Post created to offer a conservative viewpoint on its Web site...

But by late Thursday, the bloggers had found instances of what appeared to be plagiarism, including an article by Mr. Domenech in The New York Press that contained passages resembling an article that ran on the front page of The Washington Post.

Evidence of one instance of plagiarism first surfaced on the liberal blog Daily Kos on Thursday. [Kudos to Oregon Guy for getting the plagiarism search started.] A comment posted on the blog said a passage from an article by Mr. Domenech was nearly identical to a chapter from P. J. O'Rourke's book, "Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People."

Other articles that contained passages that appeared to be copied were published in National Review Online, The New York Press and The Flat Hat, the student newspaper at the College of William and Mary, which Mr. Domenech attended.

...And more, which you may read for yourself.

Although the gist of the remainder of the post is to take Jim Brady (executive editor for the Washington Post web site) to task for hiring Domenech in the first place (and for some rather puzzling statements as the plagiarism story began to break), I find it amazing how huffy and morally self-righteous so many right-wingers can be regarding, say, Bill Clinton, while at the same time blithely practicing theft and lying (which is what plagiarism is, after all).

Strange, no, that they have such a reputation for moral uprightness when so many of them prove to be so morally compass-less.

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