I won’t add much to what Hilzoy (1, 2) and Charles have already written regarding the circumstances of Ben Domenech’s sudden demise as the Washington Post. But I don’t want the occasion to pass without tossing in my two cents:
First, I feel sorry for the guy. We all should. I won’t minimize his errors, but one can’t ignore the fact that he endured a lot of truly baseless — and truly odious — attacks. The fact that the final charge stuck (and properly so) doesn’t make the rest of it right. Save for our own Hilzoy, who characteristically took the high road, there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.
Second, I expect Domenech to be back. Moreover, I look forward to his return. I say this even though my politics are pretty close to the mirror image’s of Domenech’s. Domenech zigs right where I zag left; turns protectionist where I turn capitalist; and, to my way of thinking, is more interested in a reordered government than a smaller one. But I’ve always enjoyed the debates, and know that they’ll be more in the future. F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that "There are no second acts in American lives." It was among the stupider things that he ever said. Here’s looking forward to Domenech’s next act — which hopefully sees him recast as a Rockefeller Republican ;-).
UPDATE: And then I read this (h/t Gandelman) which led me to re-read that, and I realized that my "Second" requires a supplement. As I wrote in comments, I’m not surprised that Domenech first sought to coverup his wrongs. But I hadn’t paid enough attention to what else he did, namely, toss a ton of mud on others. I have no doubt that Domenech will be back; it will, however, be a very long road. And he has only started his apologies.
Save for our own Hilzoy, who characteristically took the high road, there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.
Any links to examples of these baseless and odious attacks? I feel guilt much better with somnething concrete.
Von: First, I feel sorry for the guy. We all should. I won’t minimize his errors, but one can’t ignore the fact that he endured a lot of truly baseless — and truly odious — attacks. The fact that the final charge stuck (and properly so) doesn’t make the rest of it right. Save for our own Hilzoy, who characteristically took the high road, there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.
Oh, come off it. Augustine/Ben Domenech authored a lot of truly baseless and odious attacks. (That comment about judges being “worse than the KKK”?) When a blogger takes the low road, does he have any particular right to complain when his opponents take the same road? (And I suspect his claims to have received the most vicious attacks via e-mail is just a rework of an old cliche: “The lurkers attack me in e-mail!”)
Why do you feel sorry for him? I mean, feel free: did you also feel sorry for Dick Cheney? Why do you feel the rest of us ought to feel sorry for him? Because he was verbally and publicly attacked for the vile and odious things he said? Do you think that when someone says something vile and odious, that automatically makes him immune to attack? Or do you think that when someone loses his job due to really incredible stupidity, he ought to get a break from having his stupidity (and the other vile things he said) pointed out to him?
Second, I expect Domenech to be back. Moreover, I look forward to his return.
Why? Do you enjoy reading the vile things Domenech says so you don’t have to say them yourself? Vicarious revelling in racism and abuse?
First, I feel sorry for the guy. We all should.
Nope.
Save for our own Hilzoy, who characteristically took the high road, there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.
As with Tim, mind putting forth specifics for this supposed shame?
Second, I expect Domenech to be back.
So do I, but I sincerely doubt we’re drawing the same conclusions about his likely return.
Here’s looking forward to Domenech’s next act — which hopefully sees him recast as a Rockefeller Republican ;-).
Jocularity aside, is there any reason to believe that he’ll return as anything other than what he was?
Jesus [deleted – Ed]. The guy said judges were worse than the KKK and CS King was a communist and you’re going to whine about people being unfair to him (unnamed people)
Jesus on a popsicle stick.
I actually did a search at Kos, and I read a lot of Atrios and FDL, and I couldn’t find anything other than references to the KKK, commie and the strange article on black abortions, all of which led directly to the racist comments.
So, no, I don’t find the vicious and baseless attacks anywhere I looked. I too would like links,
Otherwise, it is no more than a baseless and vicious smear campaign, perpetuated by the Ben’s frustrated supporters.
Interestingly, O’Rourke says he never gave Ben any permission. I forget who said it, but the quote goes, more or less, “A man who will lie will do anything.” I kind of think that’s true, don’t you?
Jake
First, I feel sorry for the guy. We all should.
I sure don’t feel sorry for him. Actions have consequences and Nomenech needs to act like a man and take responsibility for his actions. The excuse ladden diary he wrote yesterday at Redstate is, frankly, something he should be ashamed of.
Save for our own Hilzoy, who characteristically took the high road, there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.
I don’t put much stock in the “they started it first” excuse, but it is at least relevant to this discussion. If the fire breathers on the Right, like Ben Domenech, want to keep calling Lefties, Democrats or Liberals traitors then they shouldn’t get so upset when the same Lefties, Democrats or Liberals take pot shots at them when the opportunities arise. Domenech has reaped what he has sown.
I read somewhere that the Fitzgerald quote should be considered an allusion to the classic 3 act play structure, and Americans are too impatient to actually go thru a second act to get to the conclusion. If that’s the case, then it suits Domenach quite well, in that he clearly tried to skip the character development and leap directly to the final act where he takes the bashing that us liberal traitors usually mete out to the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Or in Ben’s own words, “To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.” (one would have thought that he would have stayed on the mound for the whole week rather than get knocked out after a few innings)
However, the people I do feel sorry for are the ones who went out on a limb for him. A little.
I would note that over at Redstate, Charles got chewed out because he was supposed to contact Ben and the other editors by IM or email. This strikes me as a form of collusion, or message discipline if you like, which strikes me as one of those conservative/liberal splits.
von’s sentiments are those of someone with a good heart. Ben may be such a young man as well, but he has much to learn and clearly has not yet absorbed the lesson about actions and consequences — and, as Steve pointed out in the other thread, the folks at RedState (in their public statements, at least) have not helped him.
I, too, would appreciate links to the attacks to which everyone over there is referring.
I’ve seen the bloggers who cried “racist” and, right or wrong (and level of discourse aside), they had their reasons and Ben (as do all of us who vent online without a filter) gave them ammo.
I’ve seen the references to his home-schooling and questions about his mom’s competence as a teacher. Those who disagree with me (especially if I get a job as an opinion writer) are free to question the teaching of the Misses King, Elliott, Henderson, Vann, Linehart, and Mr.’s Lungren, Hart, Mills, etc.
I’ve seen the questioning of his father’s political actions/connections. Fair game.
So what did I miss, outside of comments threads which are (present company mostly excepted) full of loons?
What everyone else said.
And, to add: I feel compassion, to one extent or another, for a lot of people in this.
I feel for some of the folks at Redstate who, for all their flaws and nastiness, were basically loyally standing by their friend and assuming he was telling the truth without looking too closely at the evidence.
I feel for Ben’s father, who posted in the first non-apology thread that he was proud of his son. I could hear my own father speaking those words, and I would hope all of us with living fathers are lucky enough to have one like that. If I’d just lied through my teeth in public and my father posted that he was proud of me, I’d feel like world-class scum.
I feel for Domenech’s family, who didn’t deserve to get dragged into the consequences of his dishonesty. If anyone on the net was prank-calling them or making threats, I hope they rot. But any embarassment they suffered that is solely the result of his resignation and public humiliation are his fault alone, and he needs to answer to them.
For Domenech himself, I have nothing but contempt. Someone who has spent his political and blogging careers demonizing people has no room for complaint when it blows back on him. He built his journalistic career, such as it is, by stealing the works of others. When his theft started coming to light, he spent two days shifting the blame onto others, lied to his friends and family, and let them publicly stake their reputations on things he knew to be lies. When confronted with evidence of his actions, he posted a public non-apology in which he lied some more and shifted blame some more, still letting his friends twist in the wind on his behalf and making them look like chumps.
And now that there’s incontrovertible proof that he was lying, we’re supposed to give him credit for fessing up? His most recent apology took almost no courage. At that point, his only alternative was to slink off into the sunset without a further word. It was an apology given only after he’d spent two days lying to and betraying everyone around him, given only when he couldn’t hide from the truth anymore. It is remarkable only in that it contains a minimum of equivocation.
Ben Domenech is a thief, a liar, and a moral coward. He is unworthy of your respect, von.
I would feel sorry for someone who claimed to be a redeemed servant of Jesus Christ and didn’t go on to make vile, hateful, proud attacks on big swathes of the rest of us. But Domenech claimed the highest moral ground and used it not to show us an example of temperance, kindness, charity, and all the other virtues Christians are supposed to care about, but anger, ignorance, meanness, and other things his God said pretty clearly are sins. Now we cap it off by finding a sustained pattern of what has to be consciously chosen fraud.
I will feel sorry for him if he ever genuinely repents and starts writing in a way that shows a little humility. Until then, absolutely not–he worked hard to put a wall of hate between himself and people like me, and if he wants to take it down, he has to do the work. I’ve got my hands full dealing with people who show some smidgen of decent good will.
Besides, it’s not like his connections will allow him to suffer for it. A liberal or progressive who engaged in years on end of plagiarism might actually run into personal and professional consequences, but nobody that plugged into the Bush machine will. It doesn’t seem that any crime is sufficient to get you tossed out of the machine’s loving embrace until/unless you criticize the boss man and “his” plans. He’ll face a little flack for giving the evil liberals a moment’ story, but then the press will refuse to follow up on the underlying questions, the machine will give him something else to do, and life will continue grandly. For them.
First — although I think the Domenech’s wrong, wrong and the punishment just — let’s not kid ourselves: plagiarism is not the first evil. Indeed, in my position, I deal with wrongdoing every day that far exceeds that of Domenech’s.
Second, Domenech’s reaction — although disappointing — is not particularly surprising. Again, I’m undoubtably influenced by my job, but I would say that 95% of folks in Domenech’s position (and worse) would react just as he did.
Third, although part of my dispute with Domenech’s worldview is that he has too much faith in the rightness of his own beliefs (aka, pride), I don’t judge him by the standards he might have set for others (or me). It matters not to me whether there is irony (or not) in this particular fall.
Fourth, I have to believe that Domenech is not only going to learn a lesson from this mess, but learn the right lesson. If we instantly presume the worst of our fellow folk, we get no where.
Finally, I would point to Catsy’s and Jes’s comments as comments of which, after reflection, I believe that the authors would not be proud.
Fourth, I have to believe that Domenech is not only going to learn a lesson from this mess, but learn the right lesson.
I’ll bet you $100 to the charity of your choice that he doesn’t.
Frankly, I think Catsy and Jesurgislac are spot on. And while I suppose I should take solace in the fact that this demonstrates that you’re a stand-up guy, von, maybe you should reflect upon the fact that Ben Domenech almost certainly would never have extended the same courtesy and sentiment to you should something like this have arisen, and definitely not to any of your liberal co-bloggers. If, as Ben’s God suggests, one reaps what one sows, perhaps Ben should have spent the last several years of his life planting different seed.
First — although I think the Domenech’s wrong, wrong and the punishment just — let’s not kid ourselves: plagiarism is not the first evil.
Nor is it the only one of which he stands accused; it’s just the one that happened to terminate his employment at the Washington Post.
Fourth, I have to believe that Domenech is not only going to learn a lesson from this mess, but learn the right lesson. If we instantly presume the worst of our fellow folk, we get no where.
Conversely, if we instantly presume the best when a host of evidence suggests the contrary, we get worse than nowhere.
Domenech’s reaction — although disappointing — is not particularly surprising. Again, I’m undoubtably influenced by my job, but I would say that 95% of folks in Domenech’s position (and worse) would react just as he did.
Perhaps, perhaps not–but they are undeserving of praise and adulation when they do so. If you look at the threads on Redstate, you’d think that he was guilty of some minor transgression that he owned up to with alacrity and decency. Nothing could be further from the truth: he built a career on theft and dishonesty, and when the truth came out he spent two days lying to everyone about it–including his friends and colleagues, whom he let stake their reputations on it. That’s not admirable or excusable in any way.
Fourth, I have to believe that Domenech is not only going to learn a lesson from this mess, but learn the right lesson. If we instantly presume the worst of our fellow folk, we get no where.
I do indeed hope that Domenech learned his lesson, although I think he would be more likely to do so if he were not surrounded by the company of peers who refused to hold him accountable for his actions, instead enabling his claims of victimization and helping him shift blame onto The Left(tm).
None of that, however, has anything to do with the way he dealt with this situation, which has been almost uniformly loathsome.
Finally, I would point to Catsy’s and Jes’s comments as comments of which, after reflection, I believe that the authors would not be proud.
I only posted after the benefit of a night’s reflection. This is not ad-lib schadenfreude, it is the result of careful consideration of the matter.
This is why I haven’t posted on Redstate about it, or posted in his second apology thread to give him kudos. I don’t think there’s anything admirable in owning up to your wrongs only after you’ve already lied about them repeatedly and been backed into a corner where you have no choice but to ‘fess up. But I also don’t think there’s any benefit to going on there and kicking him while he’s down–it would succeed only in getting me banned, pissing off people I see no need to piss off, and discouraging him from future honesty. And, I gave several people my word I would take a break from Redstate and leave them alone until things cooled down over this.
So Von, while I appreciate your solicitude for my conscience, I stand by what I said.
plagiarism is not the first evil. Indeed, in my position, I deal with wrongdoing every day that far exceeds that of Domenech’s.
I wouldn’t kick a serial killer out of prison to make room for Ben Nomenech, and I don’t think anyone else would. Who believes or even implied that plagiarism is “the first evil” or even close to it?
Second, Domenech’s reaction — although disappointing — is not particularly surprising.
His “disappointing” reaction is why I have no sympathy for him. As others have noted, Ben’s friends at RedState put a lot on the line to defend him and he stood by and egged them on. I find it hard to believe Ben didn’t know his friends were defending a guilty man. His actions were nothing less than shameful.
I have to believe that Domenech is not only going to learn a lesson from this mess, but learn the right lesson.
I don’t think he will learn any lesson if others continue to dismiss his wrongdoings as minor, easily understood or youthful indescretions, as I believe you are doing. Nomenech’s journalistic career may be over three days after it started. While his plagiarism may not be “the first evil” it has cost him a dream job and possibly a career. It doesn’t appear to me that either you or he realize how horrible those consequenses are.
I hope this helps him become a better person, or even a good person.
Till then, this is just a case of a bad person getting what he deserves. He lived by fanning the flames of hatred and by lying and by defaming. Boo freaking hoo that the truth and his own actions have consequences.
I think he should enlist.
Come on now. Another conservative gets added to the list of liars and you feel sorry for him.
I wouldn’t put any stock at all in his faux contrition.
First, I feel sorry for the guy. We all should.
Really, von? Tell us, then why we should. The Ben Domenech case is not a matter of a repected writer or journalist with an otherwise fine record who has unfortunately been caught out in plagiarism: he is/was a partisan hack blogger, writing on a partisan hack echo-chamber blog, and most of whose output has consisted mostly of precisely those “baseless and truly odious attacks” you seem to feel are so awful when directed back at poor Augustine the Martyr.
I’m sure there’s a word or words (in Ancient Greek, probably) that describe the Ben Domenech types of the blogosphere in a nutshell: “pride” , imo, doesn’t quite make it. “Arrogant overweening self-righteousness” does: as does “sneering dismissive contempt for opposing viewpoints”, also: “egocentric self-importance” – take your pick, von; but if you expect sympathy and/or “understanding” for a writer’s travails with a plagiarism scandal, you might want to selct a better example than Ben Domenech of RedState.
He just ain’t a sympathetic character, and, IMHO, got exactlyly what he deserved.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that “There are no second acts in American lives.” It was among the stupider things that he ever said.
Along with, “Let me never stop drinking martinis.”
P.S. — I wonder how many of the Washington Post’s fellow residents of Chocolate City (h/t: Parliament) feel that activist judges are worse than the KKK.
Finally, I would point to Catsy’s and Jes’s comments as comments of which, after reflection, I believe that the authors would not be proud.
I think suggesting that Jes and Catsy ought to take the high road isn’t really demonstrating much forgiveness on your part, especially after arguing that ‘there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.’ (what sites are taking as typical? And are they front page posts and not comments?)
And I think it was Paul who said ‘be angry and sin not’ Would that a few more people on your side of the fence be a little angrier when accusations against the left are raised.
JayC, I think the word you are looking for is hubris.
Von, can you please provide a link that demonstrates that “one can’t ignore the fact that he endured a lot of truly baseless — and truly odious — attacks.”
Sure, I will concede that some of my colleagues on the Left went over the top in attacking Ben. This being the Internet, I can practically concede that point without even reading what they said. Armando of dkos, no delicate flower he, publicly said that some of the attacks (most notably the “homeschooling” stuff) got too personal.
But you know what? Ben loved the attacks, while he still felt he was untouchable. When the column was still going strong, he reveled in it. He proclaimed to the world, thanks, I love the free publicity. I have no doubt that he welcomed it as some sort of Malkinesque moment to show how unhinged the liberals can be.
It was only after he was forced to resign over the plagiarism issue that he started to have a problem with all the “hate mail and death threats.” I’m certainly not going to take his word for anything other than stuff I’ve seen with my own two eyes, considering he made the allegation in the exact same posting where he claimed P.J. O’Rourke gave him permission, et al.
I will make you a deal, von. When I see one RedStater with comparable heft to Armando repudiate Thomas’s statements:
I repeat: Should the entire American Left fall over dead tomorrow, I would rejoice, and order pizza to celebrate. They are not my countrymen; they are animals who happen to walk upright and make noises that approximate speech. They are below human. I look forward to seeing each and every one in Hell.
then at that point, and only then, will I start to feel bad about the meanness of a small minority of the people that Ben’s site would love to see dead.
“Any links to examples of these baseless and odious attacks? I feel guilt much better with somnething concrete.”
I would go Tim one further- you’ve accused not just a small minority, but *almost everyone on the left* except hilzoy (perhaps careless phrasing?) of baseless smearing. And haven’t backed it up one iota.
I believe that we are reading different internets. On the internets I read, objecting to smears of MLK and to a comparison of the USSC to the KKK does not count as ‘baseless, odious attacks’. I also saw a few people (intentionally?) misinterpreting a quote taken out of context- something that is over the line, but certainly not practiced by ‘virtually the entire left’.
(otoh, you feel that Catsy’s apparently justified rebuke is uncalled for, so perhaps in this case you feel that even pointing out Domenech’s admitted flaws and failing to forgive him is over the line… but you enjoy *Domenech’s* smearing style of prose enough that you look forward to his return. Curious, that.)
I am not looking forward to Domenech’s return. I am looking forward to some other young conservative writer getting his shot, someone who 1)has a shred of integrity (ie isn’t a liar and a plagiarist) 2)prefers reasonable discourse to baseless attacks and smears & 3) gets the job on talent and effort rather than family or political connections.
There is really nothing in this guy’s story to admire. Im with Geek- I honestly hope he grows up, but for now he’s a pretty pitiful creature.
Sorry, Domenech is the guilty one, not me, and not “the left”, or the left minus Hilzoy. “The left” is not responsible for whatever insanity you’ve dredged up from Democratic Underground or the Atrios comments. I think some bloggers went overboard with the racism charges, but then you’re going overboard yourself by blaming all of us who had nothing to do with whatever it is you’re concerned about.
Domenech did wrong, and he’s getting what he deserves. I see no reason to feel worse for him than for anyone else in that situation, and I certainly don’t feel guilty about it.
There’s a recommended diary on RedState now titled “Deviancy defined downward, again.” Surprisingly (okay, not really) it’s not about RedState’s reaction to Domenech’s plagiarism.
God the I am blinded by all the halos shining in this place. You would think nobody ever did anything wrong, or something that they aren’t too proud of.
Grow up, you guys are sitting in judgement, and putting yourselves on pedestals nobody belongs on.
The reality is that he is young, and did something stupid, and is paying a reasonable price for what he did. He lost his job-nothing like getting fired at 24 (and it is pretty clear he wasn’t going to have any choice but resign).
So what punishment are you demanding beyond this? Should he be forever villified? Should he never get a job again (although he would obviously be suitable to run for office, since plagiarism by congressmen and senators don’t matter-shoot murder by senators don’t matter).
Frankly I agree with Von 95% of the people when first confronted with something they did wrong are going to deny it, or make an excuse.
I hope you guys learn the very humility you want Augustine/Ben to learn, because all I see are bunch of puffed up blowhards (with a few exceptions).
I actually feel sorry for “Augustine” as well and said as much on RedState (I tend to like most people, even those I disagree with vehemently), but I can’t help but wonder what the response would be were the shoe on the other foot? How the Red blogs blasted Kos for his disrespectful comment about the mercenaries killed in Iraq gives us one indication (i.e., it was also odious), but more than that, the thing I’ve learned over the past 5 years is that those in power only ask for common ground when they’re behind…when they have what they see as capital, they’ll trample over everyone they find in their path to do what it is they want. From all I’ve read of Ben’s prose, I find no reason to separate him from the crowd (insert plagarism joke here), so I’m at a strange place.
My gut response is to forigve the guy and look forward to his second act, but I can’t help but fell he himself would interpret that as a sign of weakness on my part and would never respond in kind where the situation reversed. The way Krempasky couldn’t acknowledge Ben’s error without going to great lengths to criticize the left, for example (Note: contrition only counts when one accepts the blame without bellyaching), suggests otherwise.
I didn’t really think the previous poster would have the courage to attack liberals for having the audacity to sit in judgment, and then just a few paragraphs later bring up Ted Kennedy. But I was wrong!
Hilzoy’s Bill Clinton analogy grows more and more apt by the day. People who have no compassion for Clinton whatsoever are suddenly saying “of course a person is going to lie when confronted with something embarassing, have a heart!”
I don’t think we do our friends or our country any favor when we give people a free pass just because they happen to be our ideological comrades. Forgiveness is commendable. Instant forgiveness should be left to God.
Edward_, I can understand forgiving the guy (if you assume his contrition is sincere), but why would you look forward to his second act? There are thousands of skilled writers out there that might deserve attention. How about we give all of them a first shot before giving Ben a second?
The “second chance” proponents are reminding me of Marion Barry supporters. Of course, there are enough of them that he got his second chance as mayor and then a third chance as a councilman.
God the I am blinded by all the halos shining in this place. You would think nobody ever did anything wrong, or something that they aren’t too proud of.
(…)
I hope you guys learn the very humility you want Augustine/Ben to learn, because all I see are bunch of puffed up blowhards (with a few exceptions).
Heal thyself, etc. I hope you understand the irony of getting all puffed up and self-righteous in order to condem someone else’s puffery and self-righteousness.
Have I done wrong in my life? Hell, yeah. I’ve done plenty to be ashamed of, and I’ve paid my dues. That doesn’t prohibit me from criticizing others when they’ve done wrong. I’m also, yanno, not the guy who built a career on stealing from others and spent the last two days letting his friends twist in the wind defending those lies, so it’s not my life that’s on trial here.
Now, to knock down the straw men you’ve so kindly erected for us.
So what punishment are you demanding beyond this?
None.
Should he be forever villified?
No, but neither should he be held up as some kind of martyr of the left’s inherent nastiness and given a hero’s welcome for coughing up some contrition at the eleventh hour, which is what’s happening over at Redstate and, to a much lesser extent, here in Von’s post.
Should he never get a job again
Not as a journalist, no.
Words are a writer’s stock in trade. Plagiarism is the literary equivalent of malpractice by a doctor. A pattern of malpractice like Domenech’s pattern of plagiarism would, at a minimum, cost a doctor their license to practice. It wouldn’t stop them from getting a job where the nature of their crime was unrelated to the job at hand, and Domenech shouldn’t be penalized in seeking a job where the originality of his creative works are not relevant. In fact, if he’s smart he could parley this into a great career in writing rap music.
Dang, it’s a veritable lumber yard in here!
Instant forgiveness should be left to God.
Not a Christian are you? You do realize that Christians are told to be forgiving. Granted the worldview of what forgiveness is, and Christian forgiveness are often a bit off.
Also, why all the judgement on whether his apology is good enough? What more does he owe you anyway? As a matter of fact what does he owe you, how were you the harmed party here?
And I am honest when I ask, what exactly is the appropriate punishment here? The guy lost his job, and I suspect he will lose his job with the publishing house, does he have to pay something further to make you happy? What is it exactly?
And the self righteousness around here does abound, go reread some of the posts-you guys are condemning Ben when you have a giant plank in your own eye with regards to humility.
I dunno, von. I hadn’t followed Ben/Augustine’s writings all that closely before this came up, so I may just be missing something. But here are the facts as I see them:
A privileged kid makes his way on the college paper, and then on to whatever stint he did at NRO, etc., on the basis of a combination of connections, deception, being decent though not great with words, and (I assume) personal charm. Jobs come easily to him, and rather than thinking he should either not take such jobs or taking himself to have an extra responsibility to do them well, to retroactively make it the case that he would have gotten them without connections, he lies and steals some more.
Meanwhile, he posts a lot of things that are striking for their self-righteousness and their willingness to smear other people. As a result of all these things, he gets a high-profile job at the Post, and rather than stopping to ask himself whether all this stuff will come out, and if so what he’s going to do about it, he takes it. He is then caught, whereupon his first instinct is to lie to his supporters and blame other people. Finally, when it’s unavoidable, he fesses up.
That seems to me to be the outline. Now my bid for a Karnak, aka my best guess as to the backstory, which should be taken as the total guess it is. I should also note one possible source of bias: as a privileged kid myself, I have Views about how one should deal with this that are not hypothetical, and about which I feel strongly, in the way one feels strongly about things that one has dealt with oneself. That said:
I see a kid who used his connections throughout his adult life. You can’t always just turn down every job where you think those connections might have played some sort of role (sometimes you don’t in any way try to use them, but still suspect that your employer’s attitude towards you, and/or decision to hire you, might be affected by them, and refusing to take any job where that’s the case is, I think, sometimes too much to ask*), but, as I said above, where you don’t, you have (it seems to me) a responsibility to be aware that what has happened is prima facie unfair, and to do what you need to do to make it the case that the decision to hire you was absolutely the right one. I see no reason to think that he did this.
And that says something about him: a willingness to benefit from facts that give him an enormous advantage over other equally qualified people without doing his best to recognize, let alone live up to, the responsibilities that that imposes. And just helping yourself to the benefits of unfairness without recognizing either the existence of that unfairness or any corresponding responsibilities shows, I think, a lack of character.
When I read some of his uglier comments, I also think: this sounds like someone who is taken in by the fun of being a connected guy on the “right” side, but who doesn’t stop to consider that the people he attacks are actually people. I mean: it can be a lot of fun to feel that you’re crusading on the side of the angels, with the moral wind at your back. It can lead you to say really lousy things about people on the other side, if you allow yourself to get carried away by the fun, and don’t stop to think about what you’re actually doing. This, again, does not make me think particularly well of him.
And then there’s the business of his stringing his friends out to dry when this first broke. I do not underestimate the difficulty of coming clean at a moment like this. I really don’t. (I have mentioned before the horrible moment when I knocked a glass bottle off a sixth-story windowsill and had to steel myself to go down to see whether I had killed anyone. It was truly horrible.)
However, there was, really, quite enough time for him to steel himself and fess up, at least to his friends and family and co-bloggers, between when this started to break and when he must have told at least the RedState editors that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that there was an explanation for everything. There really was. He did not have to let them go out on a limb for him and end up looking foolish, or let his Dad say how proud he was. And that, too, makes me think: this is not a guy with a lot of character. This is a person who is, when push comes to shove, selfish and immature.
Moreover, he didn’t just let his friends defend him; he himself blamed other people — e.g., the nameless editor who supposedly inserted the borrowed material. And that’s just wrong.
While I think I understand at least part of his story, and thus don’t feel anything like ‘Egads! a moral monster in our midst!’, I do not find myself feeling particularly sympathetic to him. Partly, I think, that’s because there are a lot of people in this story who have prior claims on my sympathy, like the RedState editors who did not leap to the attack, the people he vilified in his posts, and the aforementioned nameless editor.
Partly, though, it’s because I don’t think that sympathy is really what he needs right now. Again, if I had to guess, he has had a lot of sympathy over the years. What he needs is to acknowledge that there are standards that you can’t game or charm, standards that every adult ought to try to live up to, and that he has just violated. So I’m not sure that people who extend sympathy to him are necessarily doing him any favors.
On some level, I’m reminded of the scene in ‘Quiz Show’ in which Charles van Doren confesses to having lied — a much more impressive confession, and a much fuller acceptance of responsibility, than Domenech made — and everyone starts applauding, until one Senator says:
In that scene, I thought that van Doren had finally decided to step up and not be the golden boy everyone thought he was, and thus that there was something horrifying about the ovation he started to get — some sense that he had finally tried to make his escape, only to find that the thing he was trying to escape from was one step ahead of him. As people started to clap for him, and then stand, I kept thinking: no, stop, please don’t do that — as much for van Doren as for anyone.
I don’t see any evidence that Domenech has gotten to the point of wishing, on any level, that the applause would stop. But I feel sort of the same way about the comments about how wonderful it is that he has come clean. I don’t think it does him any favors.
I believe in second acts. But I also believe that they work best when the first act has come to some sort of real resolution. I wish him the best, but I don’t think the best will be easy, nor do I think that it will help him get there if people continue to extend to him the sort of special treatment that he seems to have relied on.
***
* For instance: I believe that when I got my first philosophy job, one of the people in my department was unduly impressed by what I think of as The Fact Of Dad. This person was generally unreasonable: he raised objections to hiring all sorts of people for no reason that I could ever understand, though one part of it was that he was generally against hiring anyone whom he could perceive as a threat.
One part of his unreasonableness was massive snobbery, which meant that while other people who were perfectly good were dismissed as not good enough for him (no one was good enough for him), I was instead seen as some sort of trophy or proof of something. (I mean: apparently, before I arrived, he used to say: I’d like to see the administration try to push us around now that we’ve hired X’s daughter! — Which is absurd on its face: I mean, why should the administration care about a retired administrator at another university entirely?)
The Fact Of Dad might be seen as just defusing his general unreasonableness, allowing the other people to decide, for once, on the merits. But other people didn’t get the luxury of having his unreasonableness defused. This was, I think, unfair.
Still, in this case I had done everything I could to be the best candidate for the job. The job-seeking system was generally fair. I was not trying to capitalize on any unfairness, and had not in any way tried to produce this response in him. I didn’t think that fairness required that I turn down the job just because he had this bizarre attitude. That would, I thought, make my professional life hostage to other people’s attitudes in an unreasonable way. But I did think I had an extra responsibility to make the decision to hire me be the right one.
“Save for our own Hilzoy, who characteristically took the high road, there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.”
Gee, thanks, Von. Now quote me one word I said about the guy before the plagiarism charge.
And now you’ve indicated that generalizations about “the right” are things you approve of.
I disagree.
Unlike others, I don’t need examples of odious attacks on Domenech. I’m sure they exist. And if you’d simply said that there were many of such, and condemned those that made them, I’d not complain.
But you didn’t. That’s not what you said. You instead choose to say this: “there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.”
That’s not just condemning those who made odious attacks, however many people did: how many did, do you estimate?; obviously you can’t be exact, but give us a range, since you are specifying that “there aren’t a lot on the left” who did not — so you must have at least a proportion in mind, being a lawyer, and all, and careful in choice of language).
Obviously you feel the proportion of those on the left is over 70%; 60% of the left couldn’t possibly be “n[ot] a lot,” right?
No, you’ve specifically condemned all but “not a lot of” people on the left, and indicated that with the exception of Hilzoy, “a lot on the left” have something to be ashamed of.
I’m on the left. You’ve said I have something to be ashamed of.
I do not. And I know of no reason to agree that rather than that a few on the left may have made unjustified attacks on Domenech (and I have no idea how few: 20? 50? 500? I have no idea. But I’m sure it’s not 50,000, or 500,000, or 5,000,000, and I’m sure it’s not most).
So now you’ve said something you shouldn’t walk away from feeling proud of having said, having slurred most on the left with no cause or basis.
Unnecessary. And I’m personally offended; I’m just fine with my behavior in this matter. For you to imply otherwise: you have no basis, sir.
Uhmm…
“But here are the facts as I see them:
A privileged kid makes his way on the college paper, and then on to whatever stint he did at NRO, etc., on the basis of a combination of connections, deception, being decent though not great with words, and (I assume) personal charm. Jobs come easily to him,”
You do know those aren’t actually “facts” don’t you? Conjecture yes. But facts?
God the I am blinded by all the halos shining in this place. You would think nobody ever did anything wrong, or something that they aren’t too proud of.
If you could point me to where you are making a similar statement at a right of center site in defending someone on the left at the receiving end of some response to a claimed outrage so as to show us how it’s done, I’m sure we would all appreciate it and be suitably impressed.
So what punishment are you demanding beyond this? Should he be forever villified? Should he never get a job again (although he would obviously be suitable to run for office, since plagiarism by congressmen and senators don’t matter-shoot murder by senators don’t matter).
Simply pointing out that he’s getting what he deserves is not advocating some punishment. It’s not like we are putting him on a box holding electrodes or strapping him to a board and submersing him in water based on the word of some informant. And if you’ve got any examples of people on this board defending senators who murdered someone, I would love to see that as well.
Catsy pointed out that a journalist (despite Ben’s denial that he was a journalist) lives by his or her words, so pretending that someone else’s words are their own is a lot worse than a politician who uses a colorful anecdote or a joke in one of their speechs that they cribbed from someone else (which might have not even been him, but his speechwriter, given that Ben worked as a speechwriter for Coryn and Tommy Thompson). Your argument is akin to discovering a doctor who substituted a generic medicine and charged for the brand version and arguing a parallel is your wife using the store brand of mayonnaise instead of Miracle Whip, so stop beating up on the guy.
But that is probably me just being all puffed up with pride, so I look forward to some examples or links to your humility so I, nay, all of use, can learn. Failing that, actually quoting the sections of the posts that you find prideful might be a better strategy so that we can see where we are going off the rails. If you are interested in actually changing minds.
And the self righteousness around here does abound, go reread some of the posts-you guys are condemning Ben when you have a giant plank in your own eye with regards to humility.
So…I have little to no humility because I judge Nomenech’s actions but you are dripping with humility inspite of passing judgement on my actions?
If you want a moritorium on judgement you may want to start with yourself.
Not a Christian are you? You do realize that Christians are told to be forgiving. Granted the worldview of what forgiveness is, and Christian forgiveness are often a bit off.
See, the great thing about Christianity is that it’s not a fundamentalist religion. Two people can disagree about what it says. If you truly believe that when someone lies to you repeatedly, then says they’re sorry when they finally get caught in the lie, Christianity requires that you forgive them instantly and give them a completely free pass on the lies, then I accept that as your view of Christianity. But don’t accuse me of not being a Christian just because I don’t agree.
To me, being forgiving means that you realize bad acts do not make a bad person. It means you give people the benefit of the doubt, and an opportunity to redeem themselves. It doesn’t mean you continue to condemn them 50 years after the fact, as conservatives are all too happy to do to Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy. It doesn’t mean that if you want to raise your kids not to lie, you let them lie and lie till they get caught and then forgive them the moment they own up to it.
Oh, you instantly forgave Bill Clinton once he apologized, right? You objected to the continuing attempts to persecute him, didn’t you?
In theory, conservativism is the ideology of personal responsibility. In practice, it seems to me, conservatism is the ideology of personal responsibility unless and until a conservative does something wrong.
The fact is, neither you nor I has a say in what will happen to Ben down the road. But his supporters seem to have a great deal of trouble accepting that what happened to him was HIS responsibility, and not the responsibility of those mean old liberals or anyone else. Whatever consequences he may face down the road, and those are not up to me, are HIS responsibility.
I don’t think you even see the irony in accusing us of standing in judgment, and then simultaneously DEMANDING that we pass judgment by telling you what further punishment we think he deserves.
Simply pointing out that he’s getting what he deserves is not advocating some punishment.
No, but it does appear to be gloating.
Also, I haven’t argued that losing his job is an inappropriate consequence. And I suspect he will lost his other job.
As for the humility-
Go reread some of the posts here, there are criticism that his apology isn’t good enough. Who are you to judge whether his apology is good enough? Who are you to sit in judgement on whether he has met your standard for forgiveness? That is my point. You guys-and not all of you-are demanding something that I am not even sure is owed to you, and deciding that it isn’t good enough.
And frankly, my first post said pretty clearly that none of us is perfect, and none of us belongs on a pedestal, I recognize that I am human-at this point it is a bit sickening to see people take pride in somebody else’s fall, and demand more.
“You do know those aren’t actually ‘facts’ don’t you? Conjecture yes. But facts?”
Obviously Hilzoy knows that “the facts as I see them” are conjecture, yes. She didn’t say “facts” with no context. She said “the facts as I see them.”
Quoting a single word out of context without regard to the meaning of the context is called “quoting out of context.”
It’s generally not considered a legitimate argumentative technique. I do presume, though, that you used it in haste and without thinking, not maliciously and with conscious forethought.
People who have no compassion for Clinton whatsoever are suddenly saying “of course a person is going to lie when confronted with something embarassing, have a heart!”
Steve, there’s a difference, there, and it involves being under oath. It’s not a small difference.*
As for the odious comments, I would include the following:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/3/22/104154/380
http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/2/7/232743/2784
http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/3/24/12179/8661
http://www.redstate.com/story/2006/3/22/155745/257
Of course, some of those comments implicitly accuse me of being a racist as well, so I’m not sure if they’re Domenech-specific.**
von
*By the way, I’m not excusing the prosecutor’s conduct with Clinton. Indeed, I was in a deposition of a witness (not my own) not too long ago in an extremely high stakes piece of litigation — a case with so much intrigue and so many interesting little quirks that it could quite easily be assumed to be a novel. (Most cases can’t.) A question was asked of the witness regarding a visit that she paid to the house of her boss: basically, could she describe the place. She said, not really: she arrived late at night and left early the next morning and didn’t see much. There were plenty of reasons for her to be nervous before, but the tension in her voice in providing her answer was palpable. If she was asked the next question, it was clear (to me) that she was going to lie. The examining attorney — my opponent — looked up, looked down, and changed the subject. It was to his great credit, in my mind.
**I disagreed with his CSK comment, though I can’t recall whether I noted it at the time. Indeed, I disagree with more than a few Domenech’s views, and tend to think that the Republican party could do a lot better job listening to African American concerns. There’s no evidence that (and no grounds to call) the guy a racist, however.
at this point it is a bit sickening to see people take pride in somebody else’s fall, and demand more
Who, exactly, is “demanding more”? Specific quotes, please.
“Steve, there’s a difference, there, and it involves being under oath. It’s not a small difference.”
There’s a legal difference, sure. Is there also a sufficient moral difference, such that one type of lie should be instantly forgiven the moment the liar is caught and apologizes, and the other type of lie is irredeemable, years and years after the fact?
See, the great thing about Christianity is that it’s not a fundamentalist religion. Two people can disagree about what it says. If you truly believe that when someone lies to you repeatedly, then says they’re sorry when they finally get caught in the lie, Christianity requires that you forgive them instantly and give them a completely free pass on the lies, then I accept that as your view of Christianity. But don’t accuse me of not being a Christian just because I don’t agree.
Really, now. Whether you “forgive” him is up to you; I admit to being partial in that area towards my friends and biased towards my enemies. What can’t be disputed, however, is that Domenech has paid a heavy price for his past misdeeds, and he’s going to continue paying that price for some time.
Now, onward to something else.
See, the great thing about Christianity is that it’s not a fundamentalist religion. Two people can disagree about what it says. If you truly believe that when someone lies to you repeatedly, then says they’re sorry when they finally get caught in the lie, Christianity requires that you forgive them instantly and give them a completely free pass on the lies, then I accept that as your view of Christianity. But don’t accuse me of not being a Christian just because I don’t agree.
Actually, Christians are told to be forgiving, even in the absense of apology. Also, forgiveness doesn’t mean that what happened is okay or right, it just means you move on. Forgiveness isn’t really about the person doing the wrong, it is about the person doing the forgiving.
Oh, you instantly forgave Bill Clinton once he apologized, right? You objected to the continuing attempts to persecute him, didn’t you?
Love how you assume things here-but the reality is I don’t know that I felt personally wronged enough to need to forgive him. I do think he managed to avoid paying the full price for his actions, but I do think his situation is probably an apt comparison to how people will rally around those they like and not those they don’t.
What I can tell you is that I never gloated or felt happy about Clinton’s fall. I think what happened was mostly sad for the country, and I actually felt kind of bad for him-much like I do Ben-because of the public aspect of the situation. Most men who are adulterers, don’t have their sins plastered on the news nightly.
Hard enough to come to terms with being caught doing something wrong, but to have it happen publically (granted outside of the blogsphere nobody even knows who Ben is, so it isn’t exactly the same kind of public) makes it harder. I also think the public aspect of it, leads to the first rounds of denial-I think we all remember the “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” denial. Then as evidence came rolling in, guilt was evident in both situations.
But Clinton apparantly got lots of forgiveness, lots of love, and has a career. I hope you don’t withold the ability for Ben to do the same.
As for Kennedy-I don’t ever remember his apology for leaving a young woman to drown, but it is possible I missed it given that when he ran for president, I was far more interested in riding my bike to the swimming pool and playing softball.
For that matter, who, exactly, is “taking pride” in Domenech’s fall? Specific quotes, please.
Is there also a sufficient moral difference, such that one type of lie should be instantly forgiven the moment the liar is caught and apologizes, and the other type of lie is irredeemable, years and years after the fact?
Yes, Steve. A lie in a judicial system has the potential to work a massive injustice, by misaligning the substantial powers of the state against the innocent.
Who are you to judge whether his apology is good enough?
I am a living, breathing human being. I have delivered and received many apologies over the course of my life and some have been very heart felt and genuine while others have been very superficial and condescending. It doesn’t take a mind meld with Mr. Domenech to figure out an apology laced with excuses and accusations isn’t very genuine.
I might ask you how you concluded some of the commentors in this thread are acting prideful? My guess is your answer would be similar to my answer above. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, however, so please feel free to descrbe the process you went through to conclude some of the commentors here have been prideful?
von: There’s no evidence that (and no grounds to call) the guy a racist, however.
There’s plenty of evidence, it simply isn’t conclusive.
What can’t be disputed, however, is that Domenech has paid a heavy price for his past misdeeds…
Eh. He’s paid a price; how heavy remains to be seen.
and he’s going to continue paying that price for some time.
Bollocks.
Or at the very least, assuming facts entirely not in evidence.
No Gary, you are incorrect. The “facts as I see them” isn’t synonymous with conjecture. It refers to the subset of facts as know to the person. Conjecture is an inference from incomplete evidence. Hilzoy did not refer to any facts; it was instead the ‘conjecture as I see it’.
I won’t make any assumptions about why you felt a need to interject a false notion into the conversation.
Von, before you move on, any comment on people’s reaction to the last sentence of your second paragraph? Are you standing by it?
I feel kind of bad for him, mainly because it was such an incredibly STUPID thing to go down on. I mean, plagiarizing movie reviews and humor columns, starting for a college paper? What’s the point of cheating at your hobby?
I don’t wish no-career on anyone, as I’ve witnessed how much that sucks, but I sure wouldn’t hire him for a writing job. Journalism, speechwriting–these are not easy fields to break into. I know firsthand (which is part of why I didn’t comment, I can never separate the “but I could do so much better and it’s flatly unimaginable that I’d get that opportunity” from righteous condemnation of the Stephen Glasses and Ben Domenechs of the world.) Even without the plagiarism thing it was a pretty ridiculous decision for the Washington Post to make.
The right wing “press” being what it is I suspect he’ll do just fine. I like his chances of future circulation and influence as a writer somewhat better than my own. Well, whatever. I don’t particularly look forward to his second act, but it’s not high on my list of priorities.
What does make me sad about this is that for all their higher aspirations, the thing weblogs seem to be most effective at is getting their political opponents fired. But it was pretty richly deserved in this case, I don’t think it was so dishonorable.
To finally grow up is a gut wrenching, near death experience
Composed equally of failure and consequences
And it comes to you not with grace and compassion
But with a knife, with a bludgeon, with your death it’s only purpose.
Yes, even you, the twisted, scared, pain blasted child
Of circumstance and thoughtless existence, you
Who thought that you were good enough, special enough,
Wonderful enough, to not care, not see, not KNOW the rule.
The rule is simple – if you choose to dance, you have to pay the Piper.
And there you were, completely the fool, thinking the Piper
Piped for free – no need to feel another’s pain, illness, anger, despair.
You were wrong; the Piper always gets his pound of flesh.
The Piper pipes with joy as he tears out hearts, and the pipes are
Rapturous as he eats black and old and cracked and
Stinking of corruption hearts – your heart. The Piper
Craves your heart with a passion nearly alive.
And it was a vast and selfish passion that led you
Down this path to the end of your existence, wasn’t it? It is good
That existence ends. You led not the life of a human being, but the life of a
Beast of prey. Now you are prey, and the Piper’s breath is upon you.
Like a killing frost, like the blast from a volcanic vent, that breath is killing you.
The Piper is an eater of lives, and yours is forfeit to him. Or not.
The Piper takes with one cruel hand but is compelled to offer with another.
To offer another life, a life infinitely more difficult than the one you threw away.
Will you choose that life? Will you choose never ending work and
Constant uncertainty? Or will you choose emotional death,
Leaving only the husk of a might have been human being?
Can you give yourself to the Piper?
The Piper will eat you, and if you are strong enough, you will awaken.
Young Ben has been given an opportunity that usually comes to us much later in life. I hope he grasps the lesson. If he does, we will all be the better for it.
Jake
“Now, onward to something else.”
I’d prefer an apology, first. Up to you, of course, if you don’t feel you need to, and if you feel that it’s fine to say that I shouldn’t “walk away from this one feeling proud.”
But I’m not inclined to blithely move “onward” after being personally insulted, when the person who insulted me shows no signs of awareness of having made the insult of me and my fellows.
I wrote a great many comments on Domenech yesterday. None before. Quote me those I shouldn’t “walk away from […] feeling proud,” please. Or consider withdrawing your slur, please.
Who are you to judge whether his apology is good enough?
God.
Go reread some of the posts here, there are criticism that his apology isn’t good enough. Who are you to judge whether his apology is good enough? […]
Oh, please. Enough of the sanctimonious “who are you to…” constructions. It was unintentionally ironic the first time. The second was irritatingly self-righteous. Now it’s just tiresome and entirely without substance.
I’ve also seen you repeat–three times, I think–the question of why his apology isn’t “good enough”. I don’t know who you’re responding to there, but I can at least say with confidence that it isn’t me. I’ve never said a word about his apology not being “good enough” (good enough for /what/, I’m not certain, since you haven’t specified).
What I have said is that his apology is undeserving of the kind of praise and adulation that’s been heaped on him, because it was given only after he had spent days lying about the matter to everyone and was finally confronted with irrefutable evidence of his perfidy. He exacerbated this further when his first “apology” post was nothing more than another attempt at lying, spinning, and shifting blame onto others. It demonstrated that he was not interested in owning up to his mistakes and being honest when it mattered, but rather in continuing to cover up what he’d done and let others take the heat for him. Pace Von, I do not think that 95% of us would do this–I would like to think that most people have more basic decency than to publicly embarass their friends and colleagues like Ben did.
It takes great courage to own up to your mistakes when you don’t have to. It takes no courage at all to bow to the inevitable with five seconds left on the clock. There’s a nontrivial difference there, and between what I said and the way you’re misrepresenting it.
I don’t expect anything more of Domenech. He had his chance to nut up and do the right thing, and he failed to do so at every step. What you are currently misinterpreting as my demands for more from him are nothing more than insisting that others deal with what he did honestly, instead of lionizing and martyring him and pretending that he did something noble or courageous.
Mac: I wrote: “A privileged kid makes his way on the college paper, and then on to whatever stint he did at NRO, etc., on the basis of a combination of connections, deception, being decent though not great with words, and (I assume) personal charm.”
I assume that the deception part is no longer controversial. (Here I specifically meant the plagiarism. I was assuming that his writing for his college paper had some role in his success there, and that that, plus his subsequent writing, had something to do with his getting jobs as a speechwriter and editor.)
That he’s decent though not great with words is my take on his writing; of course you can disagree.
The charm I admit up front is an assumption.
That leaves the connections. Here I guess I can only say that I very much doubt that someone with roughly his skill set, adn without a college degree, would have gotten the jobs he did without them. I don’t mean that someone actually arranged the jobs for him; it might have been something more like his dad (or he himself) meeting someone at a party and having that person end up saying: well, tell him to come talk to me. That’s much more often the way this stuff works, in my experience.
I just don’t see him getting all those jobs without the connections. Ymmv, of course.
Who are you to judge whether his apology is good enough?
Someone whose stock in trade is his word. Someone who writes and seeks to persuade by writing. Someone who bears the responsibility of judging the truthfulness of opponents.
[lawyer, not journalist. but the point remains the same. how can i know that Ben actually wrote that apology, as opposed to cribbing it from someone else? the second apology has a very different tone and writing style from the first.]
Hilzoy points to something important–there are real victims in this, and they’re the people Domenech used.
There’s the former editor of the Flat Hat, who stands accused of perpetrating massive plagiarism, and who needs some apologizing to.
There are also the young men and women who lost out to Domenech because they didn’t have his advantages. I wrote a few pieces for the college newspaper and was glad to do it, though I had no desire to make a career in journalism. It’s a happy memory. Someone at William & Mary didn’t get that experience because Domenech got the space instead, filling it up more than once with stolen words. There’s someone out there who might have made an honest as well as productive campaign aide who didn’t ge tthe position because their father wasn’t in position as Jack Abramoff’s fixer in the Interior Department. There are deeply conservative and deeply honest, articulate bloggers out there who might have done well with a shot at the Washington Post. But they’re not there in part because Domenech rode in on other people’s words.
Conservatives often like to point out that affirmative action can just lead to people being promoted beyond their preparedness and being set up for failure. That’s true of thieves, too. It’s possible that nobody with a really distinctive budding prose voice or wise insight would have gotten into any of the positions Domenech stole…but I wouldn’t want to be too confident of that. At the very least there’s the possibility of it. And the people who never got their chance are the real victims in this story.
Mac: I should probably have been clearer. What I meant by ‘the fact as I see them’ was basically what Gary thought I meant. I was trying to separate out (a) my take on the external story, leaving his psyche out of account, from (b) my much more speculative best guess as to why he did it, and what he’s like. I didn’t mean to assert that my take on the externals was above dispute, and I’m sorry it came out that way.
Well hilzoy, start with your first word there: privileged. Why do you assume that? I have no idea what his families income or wealth might be. Maybe he’s rich and connected. Maybe is family hurting for money. Maybe he’s precocious, hard charging and personable, who through hustle and charm made his own connections. Maybe his life is all silver spoons. Who knows? It’s all conjecture.
I’m already getting bored with this story and am ready for Mr. Domenech to slink off and do his penance at Heritage or Cato or wherever disgraced wingers go to rehabilitate themselves. But I really don’t like this attempt to fix the new conventional wisdom as “You lefties should be ashamed of yourself,” while simultaenously excusing away the nonstop cavalclade of douchebaggery, whining, self-pity, and eliminationist threats that has been Red State for the past several days. Was some of the language on the left blogs over-the top and unnecessarily nasty, even while their underlying points were correct? Sure. But at least they were right. The Red Staters were both assholes and wrong on the facts.
Von,
Here are the comments you suggested we read
Daily Kos by a ‘georgia10’
Matt Stoller at MyDD
Matt Stoller 2
Trevino at Redstate
Stoller’s first piece is linked to Blanton’s Redstate piece on the King funeral. Stoller2 points out that another Redstate editor helped draft the Georgia poll tax initiative. How these relate to the question of Ben, I don’t see, unless everytime Matt Stoller gets angry at a person on the right, this somehow leaves “us on the left” unable to render any judgement.
The Kos one is ‘advice’ for Ben, which I think is pretty much a tradition (I seem to remember a lot of ‘advice’ columns from the right) and it’s by someone I’ve never heard of before. The only plausible one that I can see is the homeschool rant, but given that Domenech seems to be an ID supporter, while you might decry the vehemence, there is a point there. Surely you must have had more in mind than this? Don’t tell me that a lawyer has such a tender constitution? ;^)
The above response was typed prior to your clarification hilzoy.
But Clinton apparantly got lots of forgiveness, lots of love, and has a career. I hope you don’t withold the ability for Ben to do the same.
I do not. Nor, I think, does anyone here. I think people have more of a problem with giving someone a free pass the very instant they admit to lying; indeed, in some cases, people were happy to give Ben a free pass both before and after he confessed. In all honesty, I just don’t think that that does him any favors, as a human being.
Catsy said: “It takes great courage to own up to your mistakes when you don’t have to. It takes no courage at all to bow to the inevitable with five seconds left on the clock. There’s a nontrivial difference there, and between what I said and the way you’re misrepresenting it.” While I don’t agree with the “no courage at all” part, I do agree that there is a nontrivial difference.
As for Kennedy-I don’t ever remember his apology for leaving a young woman to drown, but it is possible I missed it given that when he ran for president, I was far more interested in riding my bike to the swimming pool and playing softball.
Kennedy pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, actually. The victim’s mother said she found his apology acceptable and that she didn’t think he should resign his Senate seat, which I find to be about the ultimate example of Christian forgiveness. To most on the right, though, it’s still a fitting subject for cheap shots nearly 40 years later.
In my post above, I had mentioned Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy side-by-side. I notice you didn’t say anything at all about Byrd, who most certainly has apologized over and over again, although what he did in his youth was terrible (and certainly much worse than plagiarism). I don’t agree with those who seem to find him irredeemable, and I certainly don’t agree with those who decide whether he is redeemable based upon the political party he chooses to belong to.
Yes, Steve. A lie in a judicial system has the potential to work a massive injustice, by misaligning the substantial powers of the state against the innocent.
Von: You can’t possibly be arguing that this statement has any applicability to Clinton’s actual lie, right?
Clinton lied to spare himself embarassment. It’s hard to see how the lie could have had any bad effects beyond that; it’s hard to see how the lie could even be considered material to the case he was testifying in.
Domenech’s lies, on the other hand, in which he repeatedly accused his former editors of inserting plagiarized material into his works, had much more potential to hurt someone else than Clinton’s lies did. Those weren’t under oath, but I still don’t see how that is a moral distinction as opposed to a purely legal one.
Mac: by ‘privileged’ I didn’t necessarily mean ‘rich’. I meant: in the class of people for whom things come easier than they do for most people. Consider the story I posted a few days ago, about how credit card companies routinely clean up the credit ratings of certain people, so that they won’t have to go through the normal credit hassles that come with having a less than perfect credit rating, and thus won;t see what that’s like, and thus won’t have any incentive to fix any problems they might otherwise have encountered.
Assume for the sake of argument that that group includes lawmakers. Congresspeople are not paid exorbitant amounts of money, really. But in this one respect, their lives are made an awful lot easier.
If these things sorted randomly, so that one group of people got to skate through credit checks, and another never had to worry about overdrafts at the bank, and a third group had jobs magically appear, and so forth, but everyone ended up with some unfair benefit or other, then I would not speak of ‘privileged’ people. But in fact, they tend to clump together, so that there are people much of whose lives are eased in one way or another, and a lot more people who have to live the normal way. Sometimes one bit of the normal package is absent. (Congresspeople: huge salaries.) Some people with huge salaries don’t have many other privileges. But this does not, imho, invalidate the phrase.
I was using ‘privileged’ to mean: someone whose life includes a lot more of those credit-rating-cleaning-up sorts of things than the average. Someone whose life is a lot easier than that of other similarly gifted people, for reasons other than that person’s own effort. Money is often part of it, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. And I think it’s pretty clear that Domenech was, in that sense, privileged.
As far as the complaints about nastiness on the left go: I’m ready to entertain the whining of the collective right half of the blogosphere on this count when they make even a token effort at setting their own house in order. As it stands, I’m willing to bet a full week’s pay that you could stack up the entire sum total of every “baseless” and “odious” attack that Domenech suffered this week from the left… and it wouldn’t hold a candle to the volume of bile and eliminationism that pours out of Free Republic, LGF, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Rush Limbaugh, or Anne Coulter. Seriously: pick any one of those, and I’m betting you they will match the entire left half of the blogosphere for sheer vileness. I’ll put /anything/ said on the left half of blogistan about Domenech, sight unseen, up against Thomas’s expressed desire to see the entire “American Left” die, and Tbone’s even more sociopathic follow-up.
No, the community of Redstate, as a whole, apparently only cares about incivility and personal attacks in blogland or politics insofar as it was their golden boy who was being gored. I’m sure there are exceptions, because I’ve seen some of them post there and get shot down, but they’re either in the minority or they’re keeping their heads down to avoid being banned.
do not. Nor, I think, does anyone here. I think people have more of a problem with giving someone a free pass the very instant they admit to lying;
To make note of the free pass Clinton gets on his lie, just read above Steve’s points.
One thing that always bothered me about the Clinton affair, is that the left apparantly thinks lying under oath is justified, if it is to save yourself from embarrassment.
Not to mention that Clinton then lied again on national TV.
Then he obfuscated-the whole “meaning of is, is” stuff.
But apparantly his lie is understandable, and justified.
Maybe the real problem is the left and right are so determined to destroy the other side, that they get blinded to the faults of those in their own party.
As for Byrd I don’t care for his politics.
I wrote a great many comments on Domenech yesterday. None before. Quote me those I shouldn’t “walk away from […] feeling proud,” please. Or consider withdrawing your slur, please.
Gary, though my grammar may have left something to be desired, I did not intend to leave a null set after removing Hilzoy. I was specifically thinking of the Kos and MyDD posts, referenced above.
just me:
You’re misreading Steve pretty badly. He doesn’t give Clinton a ‘free pass’ (whatever that is) or say that Clinton’s lie was justified; he only points out that (apparently contra Von) it can’t be said to have caused further injustice in any significant sense. You can agree with that or not, but in any case it does not follow that Steve was excusing or defending the lie itself.
Similarly for your uselessly broad generalization about “the left.” In fact, I doubt you can find me an actual quote from anyone, left or right, stating or implying that “lying under oath is justified, if it is to save yourself from embarrassment.”
Maybe the real problem is the left and right are so determined to destroy the other side, that they get blinded to the faults of those in their own party.
This I can agree with, if you replace “the left and right” with “some on the left and right.”
Of course Clinton’s lie is understandable, for the exact same reason Domenech’s lies are understandable. I’ve just listened to dozens of RS posters tell me how understandable it is when someone gets caught and their first reaction is to lie.
That doesn’t mean it’s “justified,” mind you. I don’t know a lot of people on the left who were inclined to give Clinton a free pass the moment he owned up to his lie. In fact, they thought what he did was pretty awful. I don’t see anyone at RS other than a tiny, occasionally-banned minority even acknowledging that what Ben did was bad. They skip right by that in their haste to attack the left. Even the fair-minded von can’t say more than “I won’t minimize his errors” before immediately moving on to “the left should be ashamed” and “I look forward to his return.”
I don’t think the guy deserves sackcloth and ashes, or anything like that. RS doesn’t need to ostracize him, but that doesn’t mean they can’t at least acknowledge that what he did was wrong, in a way that merits more than just a token mention before proceeding to flame the liberals. This type of subject-changing post does, in fact, minimize Ben’s errors, even though von said he had no intention to do any such thing.
Other than a full-throated defense of the beauty of plagiarism, I fail to see how Ben’s errors could be minimized any more.
justme: I don’t see that steve said anything about Clinton’s lie being OK because it was meant to save himself embarrassment. He just said that it was hard to see how the lie would have had any further bad effects.
Myself, I think that it’s sometimes hard to say which of two lies is worse. You have to make this call when you have to choose between one and the other, which seldom happens, and isn’t happening here. In this case we have, on the one hand, the fact that Clinton lied under oath, while Domenech did not, and on the other the fact that Domenech hung people out to dry, blamed others, etc. (Let’s not forget that Clinton let other people come to his defense in ways that subsequently made his defenders look foolish, too.) There are bad aspects of each that have no counterpart in the other. I’m not sure I feel a compelling need to decide which is worse.
“Congresspeople are not paid exorbitant amounts of money, really.”
Digressing, I’d like to point out that the current salary for both members of the House and Senate is $165,200 per year. (More in the leadership; Denny Hastert makes $212,100, for instance.)
This is not “exorbitant” (“exceeding in intensity, quality, amount, or size the customary or appropriate limits”) by the standards of upper-class jobs or Americans, certainly, but it’s “exceeding” what’s “customary” for most Americans, I submit.
Personally, I’d be happy to get a tenth of what Hastert makes, and about double my yearly income these days, which would be the largest annual income I’d have ever had in my life at the age of 47. For context.
“But in this one respect, their lives are made an awful lot easier.”
And, needless to say, in a huge number of other respects. Just, as I said, to digress, since it’s a not insignificant problem in our political system.
Gary, though my grammar may have left something to be desired, I did not intend to leave a null set after removing Hilzoy. I was specifically thinking of the Kos and MyDD posts, referenced above.
If you were had specific examples in mind, you should have referenced them, Von, instead of making sweeping allusions to most of “the left”. The way you phrased it came across to me as an attempt to shame us into silence–a way of saying, “yes, what Ben did was bad, but most of you were very mean to him, so you should let it go.”
I’m hardly on par with Gary when it comes to anal-retentiveness, but this is a case where imprecision was not your friend. However, I’m willing to accept that this was not your intent.
Gary: that was sort of the point of my third para. in that comment, though on rereading it would have been clearer if I had said: that’s credit ratings. There are similar things all over the place. And if they were spread randomly… etc. But some people’s lives are just prettied-up credit ratings and their analogs all over.
Macallan,
Given that his father’s career background is that of Republican hack, one can surmise that the Domenech clan is not exactly dumpster-diving to put food on the table.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Doug_Domenech
“Gary, though my grammar may have left something to be desired, I did not intend to leave a null set after removing Hilzoy. I was specifically thinking of the Kos and MyDD posts, referenced above.”
Please explain how four posts (which LJ has responded about) represent most of the “the left.”
You are continuing to stand by “there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud”; you are welcome and invited to withdraw that statement and to submit a revision.
(I miss the days, by the way, when people used to “refer” to things, and not “reference” them, but this has nothing to do with Von; it’s a general disease.)
I’m not sure I feel a compelling need to decde which is worse.
Me neither, hilzoy, although if you wanted to propose a rule that says “any lie by the President is automatically worse,” I wouldn’t necessarily argue.
I don’t think anyone needs to decide which is “worse,” though. The proposition von and I were debating was this:
Is there also a sufficient moral difference, such that one type of lie should be instantly forgiven the moment the liar is caught and apologizes, and the other type of lie is irredeemable, years and years after the fact?
I personally find it clear that there is not a moral difference of this magnitude. The fact that it is not even intuitively obvious which lie is worse tends to bolster my conclusion.
One thing that always bothered me about the Clinton affair, is that the left apparantly thinks lying under oath is justified, if it is to save yourself from embarrassment.
What else do we Lefties think? What is our favorite flavor of ice cream? I am hoping it is double chocolate.
“What is our favorite flavor of ice cream? I am hoping it is double chocolate.”
Wrong, communist!
But we do believe everyone should have a minimal share of ice cream, and an opportunity to earn more.
I stand for a mixed economy for ice cream! Let no sprinkle be left behind!
In our youth it was Rocky Road; now that we’ve matured, we’ve come to enjoy Turtle in all its variations, as well as the simple sophistication of an excellent French Vanilla.
I don’t know about the rest of your, but Our present favorite flavor of ice cream is Ben and Jerry’s One Sweet Whirled.
You. Not your. You.
Fun fact: Apparently, here in the great state of Wisconsin, one can major in Ice Cream. Oh sure, that’s not what they call it, but that’s what it is.
Anyone feel like a little post-graduate work?
But what about the vegans? Are they not part of the left?
First — although I think the Domenech’s wrong, wrong and the punishment just — let’s not kid ourselves: plagiarism is not the first evil. Indeed, in my position, I deal with wrongdoing every day that far exceeds that of Domenech’s.
Isn’t this completely irrelevant? No one’s accusing Domenech of being “the first evil”.
Second, Domenech’s reaction — although disappointing — is not particularly surprising. Again, I’m undoubtably influenced by my job, but I would say that 95% of folks in Domenech’s position (and worse) would react just as he did.
Really? Let’s run through this. Domenech routinely plagiarised other people’s writing under his own name. As Augustine, he launched odious vicious attacks on his political opponents, and plainly relished getting angry responses. Then, when Domenech’s plagiarism is discovered, Domench not only denies it, but bears false witness against others – the editors he worked for, whom he claims are to blame. Finally, when it’s clear that he can’t just lie and blame others and thus escape the blame he deserves, he admits that he did it, and half-heartedly apologises to the people he traduced and lied to. Now, you may feel that this is exactly what you would have done yourself: that were you in an embarrassing situation, you would not only lie and claim it wasn’t you, you’d try to shove the blame on to others. So? Just because you look at Domenech and think “I would have behaved exactly like that, so I can’t blame him for doing it” doesn’t mean that you can’t at least acknowledge that lying about what you did in order to cast blame on other people is just fundamentally wrong. It is, Von, and it’s worth saying so.
Third, although part of my dispute with Domenech’s worldview is that he has too much faith in the rightness of his own beliefs (aka, pride), I don’t judge him by the standards he might have set for others (or me). It matters not to me whether there is irony (or not) in this particular fall.
Okay. You’re not an appreciator of irony. But I think that you’re in a minority there. 😉
Fourth, I have to believe that Domenech is not only going to learn a lesson from this mess, but learn the right lesson. If we instantly presume the worst of our fellow folk, we get no where.
How is Domenech going to learn a lesson from this mess when he is surrounded by people applauding him, aggressively defending him, and even attacking people who condemn him for what he did? You are, with this post, part of the reason why it’s unlikely Domenech is going to learn the right lesson. The lesson I think he’s learning is one he already seemed to be quite well-grounded in: it doesn’t matter what he does, all his political allies will forgive him for it.
Finally, I would point to Catsy’s and Jes’s comments as comments of which, after reflection, I believe that the authors would not be proud.
Why? What did I say that you think I ought to be ashamed of? Your sweeping attacks on anyone saying anything remotely critical of a serial plagiarist, a liar, and a racist, are consistent, at least; your lack of detail about why the people you#re attacking ought to be ashamed is… odd, to say the least.
I’d hope you would regret this post, with its sweeping attacks and nasty insinuations, but somehow I suspect you won’t.
Just Me, I’ll tell you why Ben owes us an apology.
You can find the major examples here: I link to this source only because I believe it’s the only place that hasn’t yet written about how they’d like to rape my sister.
That is dear Ben’s first word on the matter. He specifically accused lefty bloggers (or at least every lefty blogger who has posted on the subject that he has seen minus Hilzoy) of wanting to rape his sister.
That was his first act of contrition. And now we’re all supposed to be pleased as pie that he’s since offered contrition for plagiarism.
Von, you said that people like Matt Stoller were at least indirectly accusing you of racism because you post on RedState and he’s labeled it a racist blog. Well, check out the above. The left has been uniformly accused of wanting to rape Ben’s sister. Minus Hilzoy of course.
Second, I expect Domenech to be back. Moreover, I look forward to his return.
Why? Because he’s truly extraordinary?
I have some news for you: there are plenty of honest people in the world who could advocate for conservative ideas without engaging in the smearing and peddling of ignorance and lying the way Ben Domenech did.
Are you not aware of this fact?
Or are you in love with Ben?
I realize that this isn’t the universe of explanations but I find it difficult to understand why anyone would want a willfully ignorant liar like Ben Domenech to become a shaper of our country’s discourse.
Please explain yourself — coherently, without misrepresenting the facts about Ben Domenech, his lies, his willful ignorance, and his tendency to engage in smear tactics.
Of course not, I’m confident that Domenech is capable of affecting the physical world and completely unable to assume the form of Glory, the Mayor, or Buffy, for example.
“And I think it’s pretty clear that Domenech was, in that sense, privileged.”
It may be clear to you, but I do wonder why hilzoy. Unless you know the Domenech family at a more personal level than I assumed. That doesn’t strike me as something we could fairly divine from a distance.
Again, I’m undoubtably influenced by my job, but I would say that 95% of folks in Domenech’s position (and worse) would react just as he did.
What is your job? Professional propagandist?
On my planet, most people are genuinely sorry when they get busted point blank engaging in behavior which blatantly violates the “moral codes” which they hypocritically invoked to smear others.
On my planet, people apologize, ask forgiveness, and quietly fade away.
What did Ben do? He attacked the people who he smeared for his profession when they provided the evidence which showed what they knew all along: Ben was a willfully ignorant hypocrite and shill.
Sheesh, folks, he was a freaking Biblical literalist who once claimed that evolution was a crock! On what basis was Ben Domenech, a dropout with a big microphone, qualified to make such statements?
Answer: he didn’t have a basis. He was just shooting off.
This is the kind of person you want to spend time defending?
Grow up already.
“But what about the vegans? Are they not part of the left?”
Is there no ice tofu?
I’d hope you would regret this post, with its sweeping attacks and nasty insinuations, but somehow I suspect you won’t.
Who says irony is dead?
One thing that always bothered me about the Clinton affair, is that the left apparantly thinks lying under oath is justified, if it is to save yourself from embarrassment.
Ok, I’ll go this far for Ben: While he has made mistakes, I do not believe that his errors rise- by any stretch of the imagination- to the level of an impeachable offense.
Fair enough?
Von, not that nowhere in any of the links you provided did the authors come close to anything as odious as accusing Domenech of rapist fantasies.
Quite a leap of logic there, and not a remotely fair one. One quick jump from “may” to that’s-what-Von-thinks.
Karnak Award.
“Of course not, I’m confident that Domenech is capable of affecting the physical world and completely unable to assume the form of Glory, the Mayor, or Buffy, for example.”
I will forthrightly declare that I believe that the Mayor was much more evil than Ben Domenech.
Michael Hubl: “Grow up already.”
This is very rude.
Von, not that nowhere in any of the links you provided did the authors come close to anything as odious as accusing Domenech of rapist fantasies.
I’m trying to think of something more irrelevant to the circumstances of Ben Domenech’s ignoble fall from grace.
The argument that “leftists” are somehow nastier than conservatives is bogus. The argument this this bogus allegation is relevant in any way to the disturbing fact that the WaPo went out of its way to hire a lying willfully ignorant smear-merchant and Republican shill like Ben Domenech for balance is even more specious.
But, like Ben, some folks simply can’t muster up the adulthood it takes to admit error without trying to pass the bad vibes around.
Pathetic.
gary
This is very rude.
Are you trying to change the subject Gary?
I understand why you might want to do that.
Please focus on the substantive points. I trust that you have the intelligence to address the substance of my comments without sniffing out phrases and clauses that you consider “rude.”
Thanks for the consideration.
Von…
This MyDD post:
http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/2/7/232743/2784
…which you highlight above as among the more objectionable in this fracas isn’t even about Domenech. Posted in February (at the time of the King funeral) it only makes mention of a post from a Red Stater named Blanton.
In his post (below which Augustine’s notorious slander of CSK was to appear, not to mention someone else’s reference to “clips of Clinton and some brown preacher”) Blanton:
* Compares the funeral of a black civil rights icon to Def Comedy Jam
* Suggests that “the culture of so many black Americans in this country is below what it should be and is capable of being” because black leaders “are more interested in subsidization from The Man™ than salvation from the Lord”
* Suggests that this all indicates “that the left is out of touch” with “those of us who work hard for a living to provide for our families, humbly go to church, and try to do unto others as we would have them do unto us”
As Matt Stoller writes in his post, which I frankly see no problem with, “you really don’t need much analysis to see what this guy’s getting at.” I mean, it doesn’t even approach subtle.
You may not choose to call Blanton’s rhetoric “racism,” but I hope we can agree it’s something distasteful.
KCinDC: Of course not, I’m confident that Domenech is capable of affecting the physical world and completely unable to assume the form of Glory, the Mayor, or Buffy, for example.
Ah, if only. But wouldn’t that be the ultimate form of plagiarism? “From beneath you, it devours.”
On the other hand, maybe Domenech looks like Jonathan. That’d be bad.
“Are you trying to change the subject Gary?”
No, I’m saying that you’re being unnecessarily rude; you can argue with what von has said without that.
“I understand why you might want to do that.”
Really? Why?
“Please focus on the substantive points.”
Minimal courtesy is a value around here, you may or may not have noticed. I think I’ve addressed Von’s substantive points, and I think I’ve not been remotely shy about addressing the substantive points in the two threads about Domenech, which I’m sure you’ve read, since you understand my stance on the topic.
Michael, Gary isn’t trying to change the subject, and it appears he mostly agrees with you. He’s just suggesting that you temper your language and focus on your argument, not insults. That’s what this site is about.
Good point, Dan.
Michael Hubl, I’m not sure what you are saying.
I was responding to Von by pointing out that Ben accused all lefty bloggers who commented of rapist fantasies with nary one bit of evidence. All minus Hilzoy, that is.
From Ben’s first comment after the allegations of plagiarism broke:
He has not issued an apology for smearing all his critics of harboring rapist fantasies.
Minimal courtesy is a value around here, you may or may not have noticed.
I’m sorry. I didn’t notice that because I see a lot of folks here trying to deflect criticism of Ben Domenech’s inexcusable and patenently discourteous uncivil behavior.
Suggesting that someone should stop whining and wringing their hands about the deserved fate of someone like Ben Domenech is not “rude”.
It’s helpful advice.
Consider taking it.
I’m getting the sense that any prolonged disagreement with certain folks around here will ultimately be considered “uncivil”, i.e., the charge of “uncivil” is merely an excuse for censoring and ignoring the substance of the charges being levelled by the commenter.
You know, it’s sort of the same way that Republican shills on TV and radio accuse “leftists” of being “shrill” when they make “outrageous” “unpatriotic” claims like “George Bush is a liar,” or “Ben Domenech is a willfully ignorant professional smearer.”
With respect to this last paragraph, Gary, let me know if you care to dispute the reality I’m alluding to, please.
I should say that I am not at all comfortable being the token example of the no-rape-fantasies-about-Domenech’s-sister, reasonable left. I think that a lot of the posts about Domenech prior to the plagiarism were well within what I would consider the bounds of reasonable criticism. They are certainly well within the bounds of what a lot of the editors of RedState consider appropriate criticism of one’s political opponents.
I include as reasonable (which I don’t mean to be equivalent to ‘right’) some of the accusations of racism, since I assume that racism does not have to take the form of e.g. a conscious hatred of members of other races, but includes, for instance, whatever else might account for a consistent willingness to slam African-Americans when one would let a white person slide, a consistent failure to notice or care that one is being genuinely offensive to or about them, etc. (‘Consistent’ really matters here: anyone can be unfair once, or fail to notice that s/he’s being offensive once, etc., without it meaning much of anything. It’s striking patterns that matter.) I think there was enough to go on, in Domenech’s case, that whether you agree with it or not, this line of thought wasn’t unreasonable.
I tend to dislike labelling entire sites, especially ones that are not, like PowerLine, under the complete control of a few people, but that have diaries, comments, etc. I do wonder, sometimes, about why one would be on a site that includes, say, Thomas, with his (now repeated) claims that the left is subhuman, that he wouldn’t mind if the entire left dropped dead, etc. On the other hand, as I think I mentioned once, I thought about resigning here after the infamous pork lard moment, on somewhat similar grounds, and found it to be a rather complicated matter.
I think that either outrage or scorn is the appropriate response to the remark about the worst members of the judiciary being worse than the KKK, and to what he said about Coretta Scott King.
And pointing out his more or less complete lack of journalistic experience seems to me completely fair.
Likewise, I don’t know how much snark we’re going to think OK in such circumstances, but the answer is surely not ‘none’. I think that ‘mouth-breathing freak’, or whatever Jane Hamsher called him, is over my personal line. I’m also sure that the claim that I’m the only lefty blogger who has not written about how she’s like to rape Domenech’s sister does.
I’m sure that someone went over all known lines. I do not defend them. But I think that’s true on all sides.
(quoting hilzoy):”And I think it’s pretty clear that Domenech was, in that sense, privileged.”
It may be clear to you, but I do wonder why hilzoy. Unless you know the Domenech family at a more personal level than I assumed. That doesn’t strike me as something we could fairly divine from a distance.
One of the more infuriating tactics that I see in acrimonious politcal discussions is to demand proof of points that in normal debate would be easily granted. Should one, in passing, use the phrase “Michael Jordan is living the high life” to support an argument, one finds oneself googling for pictures of his house & going through the etymological derivations of the phrase “high life” before the opponent is ‘satisfied’ and debate can continue. Or, more likely, a mutually satisfactory definition of “high life” is never settled upon, and the entire debate crashes to a halt.
Yes, the kid was priviledged. As in, his father is politically connected, and has had those connections for a long time (see tequila’s helpful link above). As in, he was writing for the Washington Post at 24(?), despite his lack of experience in journalism & the obvious set of more-talented and more-experienced conservative writers on the web.
At least, the clear preponderance of the evidence weighs in that direction. Asking for definitive proof is IMO merely a way of deflecting the discussion- unless you have definitive proof to the contrary yourself, or at least something more data to add to the inference pile. In which case, please share rather than merely raising the bar.
(It reminds me very much of debates on creationism v evolution or global warming v ‘we cant tell’, in that the burden of proof can be raised arbitrarily high by those who do not wish to be convinced or who wish to derail discussion).
Or are you in love with Ben?
This would be a truly interesting twist to the story but, sadly, I must disappoint.
Pet peeve alert:
I’m sure that someone went over all known lines. I do not defend them. But I think that’s true on all sides.
As always, when invoking the “all sides had someone who crossed the line” argument, it’s necessary to immediately ask: How many? How far? and How often?
He’s just suggesting that you temper your language and focus on your argument, not insults. That’s what this site is about.
If that’s what “this site is about” then this site should be levelling withering attacks on the WaPo and Ben Domenech.
The facts about Ben Domenech’s writing — the dishonest, the smears, the willful ignorance — are all on the table.
Is there some confusion about any of these facts?
Or is there confusion about what “this site is about”?
Perhaps what this site “is about” changes depending on whether the issue is the reeking hypocricy of a semi-prominent Republican shill versus some anonymous blog commenter who’s had it up to his/her ears? The latter is attacked without hesitation while the former is smacked on the wrist by one person while ten other people make excuses for him.
I would argue that any attempt to turn the Ben Domenech debacle into a discussion about the alleged bad behavior of leftists (the discussion that Ben Domenech wants to have) is beyond the pale in terms of “civility.”
Why should there be any confusion about this?
von: kudos on the update. I didn’t realize you hadn’t read the HRO piece.
Anarch: I was not asserting moral equivalence, just preemptively acknowledging that hilzoy’s law of large numbers applies, and thus that if someone wants to produce an example of some totally offensive comment from the left, I won’t be surprised. That said, I agree.
“I didn’t notice that because I see a lot of folks here trying to deflect criticism of Ben Domenech’s inexcusable and patenently discourteous uncivil behavior.”
Why don’t you name them, and then count how many there are, and then count how many there are who have disagreed with them, and let us know what approximate proportion you find?
“I’m getting the sense that any prolonged disagreement with certain folks around here will ultimately be considered ‘uncivil’,”
Not at all. Disagreement is meat and drink around here. What’s civil and uncivil is sometimes a bit blurry on the margins, but it’s a line that’s reasonably discernable. By most people.
“i.e., the charge of ‘uncivil’ is merely an excuse for censoring and ignoring the substance of the charges being levelled by the commenter.”
No, it’s a value. There’s hardly any “ignoring” of substance around here, as you might be aware if you bothered to make yourself familiar with the environment and commenters before making generalizations about it and them.
But attempts to deflect attention from what one says by declaring that “substance” is being ignored for mere minor attention to what you actually say never flies in any reasonable online fora, or, for that matter, face-to-face discussion.
Good point, Dan.
von,
Is that ‘good point Dan, one of the four posts that I used as an example of how virtually the entire Left indulged in odious, baseless attacks on Ben is actually neither odious nor baseless, nor even about Ben at all’?
Or just ‘good point, Dan, attaboy’?
Michael, most of the commenters on this post are disagreeing with Von. They’re just doing it without saying things like “Grow up!” And if you’re going to attack people, you might consider being a little less Cheneyesque in your aim. If you have disagreements with Gary and Manyoso, spell them out. Have you actually read their comments?
Michael: the people who write here come from all sides of the political spectrum. We try to enforce civility across the board. Yesterday, we banned two people, one from the right, and one from the left. Normally, well before we get to that point, we try to say: hey, look, be civil. That’s all that was going on, and it would happen to anyone, from any side.
(It reminds me very much of debates on creationism v evolution or global warming v ‘we cant tell’, in that the burden of proof can be raised arbitrarily high by those who do not wish to be convinced or who wish to derail discussion).
And it’s a fair question to ask: is such behavior “civil”? Is it any more or less civil than asking someone to stop arguing like a child and pretending that incontrovertible facts are in dispute?
Fyi, this is a rhetorical question for folks to think about before they waste bandwidth chastising commenters for being “rude”. Please don’t waste time trying to craft an answer that pretends the behavior of professional creationists and apologists for liars, generally, is “civil.”
Hilzoy, I didn’t mean to imply that you were happy with Ben’s identification of you as the single exception to the my-left-critics-want-to-rape-my-sister clique. I would also agree that some comments made on both sides of the blogosphere divide likely fell short of completely civilized behavior.
However, I’ve yet to see anyone point out a single case where a lefty blogger declared their fondness for rape. I’ve yet to see anyone point out a single case where a lefty commenter wished the right wing dead. Literally dead.
Not that I would be shocked if someone could find such a comment in the bowels of some comment thread. Regardless, I think it is fair to say that Ben Domenech was the principle headliner in this whole affair and he himself accused leftists in general of rapist fantasies. Something for which he has not, to my knowledge, apologized for.
Yet, here we are discussing whether the left has been too mean to him.
Hey Von. I suppose that Ben calling the Post fools pretty much kills your chances of taking his place. Should we recommend you here and totally obliterate them?
manyoso: I didn’t take it that way. I just wanted to say what I did. Thanks.
“The latter is attacked without hesitation while the former is smacked on the wrist by one person while ten other people make excuses for him.”
The “former” being Ben Domenech, this statement is wildly false.
Michael, most of the commenters on this post are disagreeing with Von. They’re just doing it without saying things like “Grow up!” And if you’re going to attack people, you might consider being a little less Cheneyesque in your aim. If you have disagreements with Gary and Manyoso, spell them out. Have you actually read their comments?
I’ve never seen a site where folks are so easily distracted. Again: the bizarre disconnect is that this site wasn’t taking the lead in asking WaPo to dump Ben Domenech like a hot potato from DAY ONE.
Can someone explain why a site that allegedly prides itself on “civil discourse” wasn’t first in line to demand that Ben Domenech be removed from his position at WaPo even before this plagiarism stuff began?
I’d be interested in hearing the rationalization, bearing in mind that the Washington Post has quite a few readers and was helpful to the Bush Administration in the past peddling the sorts of (now) well-known lies and smears which led to the debacle in Iraq (lies and smears which Ben Domenech recited as happily as he recites smears against evolutionary biologists).
Let’s hear it.
von, whoa, wait a minute. You’re letting Tac provide the bulk of the links? And simultaneously implying that any ad hominem or allegation of racism whatsoever is inherently “baseless and odious?”
It’s odious that Gilliard called Domenech a home-schooled wingnut? Wingnut hardly even qualifies as pejorative anymore, and it’s sure as hell no worse than moonbat or midget. You think it’s baseless that people made fun of his homeschooling after he referred to 36% as a majority and totally misrepresented the history of the civil war? Did you actually read the Domenech piece PZ Myers linked to? Domenech talks about “something involving genetic mutation” as an alternative to “the typical evolutionary construct” for cryin out loud! It’s like something you might hear on Star Trek. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
And for pity’s sake, how thin-skinned does one have to be to get all self-righteous about a comment which reads — in it’s entirety! — “Homeschooling is evil,” posted by a person whose handle is “smalfish, enemy of the state,” on a comment thread with 556 comments, most of which are effectively gibberish? Note that a couple of comments down we find “SOCIALIZATION IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR SOCIALSIM [sic].” Huh? We’re supposed to believe that people who can barely bring themselves to disapprove of Limbaugh, Coulter and Tbone are mortally offended by a bunch of giggling atriots?
If you think stuff like that is so reprehensible then speak out whenever you see it, not just when it happens to work against people with whom you identify. Tacitus’ credibility on these matters is pretty close to zero, yet I still took the trouble to go and look at most of the links he so liberally sprinkled, simply because you, von, referred to his post. Did you look at them too? Or is this another one of those “hey, somebody else must have checked it out” things that got Jim Brady in so much trouble?
Meanwhile, no dice. Let’s see something genuinely hateful if there’s so much of it out there. I don’t doubt that it exists, but, like the WMD, it’s on you to actually find it.
As it happens I do feel sorry for Ben Domenech, and I think his parents (and Krempasky and Brady and Hewitt and whoever else is responsible for throwing him in the deep end without making sure he knew how to swim) are the ones who oughta spend a little time in the wilderness. Maybe I’m just old fashioned. This poor kid has pretty clearly never strayed from the trajectory his parents plotted for him; never had the chance to accomplish something difficult on his own steam, never struck out on his own, never failed miserably till he was 24. I’d ruined my whole life twice over by the time I was his age and it’s a miracle I survived.
Yeah, I feel sorry for him. A lot sorrier than I felt for Clinton, that’s for sure, and I didn’t like Clinton’s behavior any better than I like Ben D’s.
“And then I read this (h/t Gandelman) which led me to re-read that, and I realized that my “Second” requires a supplement.”
Jeebus, von, why don’t you try reading your own [DELETED] site before commenting on an issue, maybe?
The Human Events piece interview was linked on Obsidian Wings.
Is is too much to ask that you bother to have some familiarity with the basic facts of a story, and with discussion on your own blog, before making a front page post about a subject?
Me: So? Just because you look at Domenech and think “I would have behaved exactly like that, so I can’t blame him for doing it” doesn’t mean that you can’t at least acknowledge that lying about what you did in order to cast blame on other people is just fundamentally wrong. It is, Von, and it’s worth saying so.
Have just seen Von’s update. Key sentence: But I hadn’t paid enough attention to what else he did, namely, toss a ton of mud on others.
Well, while I might wonder why you weren’t paying attention to Domenech’s mudslinging in your rush to forgive him and to instruct the rest of us to forgive him, too, I accept that your intention was not to assure us that you too would bear false witness to get yourself out of a scrape: that somehow you’d told yourself that Domenech’s lies were of the more-forgivable “I didn’t do it!” form.
The “former” being Ben Domenech, this statement is wildly false.
No it’s not “wildly false” Gary. Is that the best you can do? Link to some rambling post which dares to admit that plagiarism is bad?
Ben Domenech is worse than a naive plagiarist.
I agree with most of radish’s last post except that I feel nothing but happiness that Ben has received his overdue comeuppance.
I won’t mention Bill Clinton except to say that the mere fact his name is being mentioned in the context of this affair shows how far off the reservation some folks are willing to wander to find an excuse to criticize “leftists.” Its bizarre, is what it is.
Can I just add preemptively that this unhappy event would be unhappier if it led to rancor in this community?
Let’s try to only get in fights over happy events.
I’m glad to see the update but sorry to see that there’s no backing off from insulting everyone on the left except “not a lot”.
E.g., “I feel nothing but happiness that Ben has received his overdue comeuppance” isn’t likely to lead to group hugs.
Wow, the debate rages on. Oddly, I had a strange craving for ice cream a little while ago, so I went out and got some fresh air and a milkshake. Highly recommended!
Can I just add preemptively that this unhappy event would be unhappier if it led to rancor in this community?
This must be sarcasm.
What’s unhappy about have one less lying willfully ignorant plagiarist polluting our nation’s discourse?
How do you expect our country to get out of the mess it’s in right now?
Or do you want professional smearers who peddle carefully crafted lies in order to promote their religion’s precepts to continue to play a major role in steering our country?
It’s okay to want that. I mean, your entitled to wish for anything. But a mature person admits this up front.
“Please don’t waste time trying to craft an answer that pretends the behavior of professional creationists and apologists for liars, generally, is ‘civil.'”
Of course, now you’re simply making stuff up out of whole cloth in implying that that’s what most people here have done, and in demonstrating your pre-cognitive powers on top of your failed post-cognitive powers.
You’re doing a fine job of making a first impression, Mr. Hubl, but it’s not too late to back up and start over. Bothering to read what people here have actually said on the topic on the “Plagiarism” and “Plagiarism 2: The Response” threads might help your actual familiarity with, you know, what people have actually said.
I’m still looking forward to your explanation of why I “might want” to change the subject from Domenech’s faults, or my disagreements with Von. What’s your “understanding” of that? My being a Republican? My track record of being soft on assh*les? My record of being pro-Bush? Pray don’t leave us wondering. (Bonus hint: I have a blog; it’s not entirely obscure; I have a record of opinions.)
“Can someone explain why a site that allegedly prides itself on ‘civil discourse’ wasn’t first in line to demand that Ben Domenech be removed from his position at WaPo even before this plagiarism stuff began?”
Sure. One never needs to explain why someone hasn’t blogged on a particular topic, since there are an infinite number of worthwhile topics. Why haven’t you made a comment about the genocide in Darfur in this thread? How do you justify that? You must not care about genocide.
I bet you have some rationalization, though.
Hey, there are a million more where that comes from, if you think that’s a logical approach.
Why haven’t you said anything here about the death squads roaming Baghdad, like I did a few minutes ago in another thread? You don’t care about death squads?
Of course, now you’re simply making stuff up out of whole cloth in implying that that’s what most people here have done
No, Gary, that’s now what I’m doing.
I’m showing you in very plain terms the hypocricy on display at “this site” which apparently prides itself on “civil discourse” but doesn’t do a whole heck of a lot when it comes to identifying and castigating the reprehensible uncivil conduct of Republican shills like Ben Domenech or the WaPo which hired a lowlife like Ben to provide balance (!!!!) with a “conservative voice.”
Or am I missing something? When Ben was hired by WaPo, were there lenghty posts by this sites authors detailing Ben’s loathesome claims and showing examples of Ben’s tendency to smear and engage in willful ignorance about subjects of which Ben knew nada?
Michael, I won’t begrudge you your opinion although I do find some chuckles in your righteous tone castigating others for not being sufficiently bothered with Ben.
I think the thing folks are quarreling with is your demands that folks ‘grow up’ and the like. Can you find it within your personal self-constraint to omit those kinds of comments.
Why haven’t you made a comment about the genocide in Darfur in this thread? How do you justify that? You must not care about genocide.
Is this civil discourse, Gary?
Can you find it within your personal self-constraint to omit those kinds of comments.
You mean comments which suggest that folk are being hypocritical, provided with explanations of how I reached the conclusion?
I think I’ll continue making those.
Feel free to reply substantively to my comments, though. You can even express your anger and frustration with my charges in the course of your substantive responses.
I’m a grown man. I can take it.
rilkefan: Can I just add preemptively that this unhappy event would be unhappier if it led to rancor in this community?
Let’s try to only get in fights over happy events.
We might not agree which were happy events, but we can at least strive not to take our disagreements personally.
Hee hee! I wrote No, Gary, that’s now what I’m doing.
Should be “not” instead of “now.”
Don’t get excited.
Some statistics:
“Plagiarism” 324 comments
“Plagiarism 2: The Response” 228
“Onward” 135 and counting
vs. (e.g., tee hee)
“Something That’s More Interesting Than Plagiarism” 41
It’s obvious this has touched a nerve.
Michael Hubl: Or do you want professional smearers who peddle carefully crafted lies in order to promote their religion’s precepts to continue to play a major role in steering our country?
I don’t think Ben Domenech had much of a role in steering our country. There are others who might fit your description more closely, but what this case has to do with them is not clear to me.
Gary: (I miss the days, by the way, when people used to “refer” to things, and not “reference” them, but this has nothing to do with Von; it’s a general disease.)
Von is a lawyer, & I can attest that two syllables are actively resisted in that profession when 3 or 4 will do.
Wasn’t at my firm 3 months before I was literally forbidden to say “use” rather than “utilize” in briefs.
Also, to Macallan: the kid’s dad is a Bush appointee, for heaven’s sake. Of course he’s got connections, and it’s obtuse to pretend otherwise. And I haven’t noticed that obtuseness is one of your traits.
Michael: You mean comments which suggest that folk are being hypocritical, provided with explanations of how I reached the conclusion?
I think I’ll continue making those.
Then I shall continue to be rather bored and annoyed by your comments.
“Link to some rambling post which dares to admit that plagiarism is bad?”
No. I’m pointing out the comment thread. This is primarily a discussion site, which you are participating in, and making declarations and generalizations about what most people have said in, and they happen to be false statements you indicate that people have been shy about criticizing Domenech; that’s just wrong.
“Ben Domenech is worse than a naive plagiarist.”
Hint: if you bothered to actually read what you’ve said, you’d notice that I’ve said far more on this, myself. But meanwhile you feel entitled to lecture us all, without bothering to actually read what we’ve written.
Michael, I think you are suffering under a false premise. You are essentially berating everyone who comments on this site, because the site itself is not sufficiently lefty activist for your taste. Well, there are sites that fit that bill. This site specializes in providing a calm place where folks from across the idealogical/partisan divide can come together and disagree strenuously, whilst still remaining civil.
If that isn’t your cup of tea, so be it. But, why would you insist that every blog take up the mantle of the lefty activist? Can’t Obsidian Wings be Obsidian Wings?
I don’t think Ben Domenech had much of a role in steering our country.
I wasn’t talking about Ben specifically. My question is broader than that.
Are you serious when you say that you don’t see any connection between characters like Ben Domenech and George Deutsch and more visible propagandists that peddle the Bush Administration’s talking points?
That is a rather shocking admission on your part, if you ask me. Feel free to clarify your views on the lack of any relationship between Ben Domenech and the larger group of Republicans who seek to have their religious beliefs accepted as facts which are then used as rational bases for legislation.
I’d be very interested to hear more on that subject.
“Feel free to reply substantively to my comments, though. You can even express your anger and frustration with my charges in the course of your substantive responses.”
Michael, try to understand: I have no anger or frustration to express. Not everyone here is as angry as you. This seems to really anger you. Ad infinitum.
We do not disagree about dear Ben. I haven’t defended him. Apparently, I’m just not as angry as you.
Michael: for heaven’s sake. For what it’s worth, I did not write about Domenech when he first got the job, but only because I didn’t feel like it, and decided instead to focus on other cases of uncivil discourse.
That said, Gary’s right. No one has to explain what they did and did not post on. Personally, I’d rather spend my time on actual issues.
The reason people are annoyed with you just now isn’t because they have all taken a vow to resist uncivil discourse wherever it rears its ugly head; it’s because you’ve chosen to participate in a discussion that normally tries to respect certain norms, and you are now violating them. I.e., it’s because you’re here, not because any incivility anywhere would provoke the same response. (I mean: I’m sure that somewhere in, say, Kansas, someone is being uncivil at this very moment, and I am not condemning them. Sorry: life is short.)
Michael, you seem to be simply looking for people to fight with, and anyone will do. You seem to be determined to find someone to argue with about Ben Domenech, not noticing that we already spent several days condemning Domenech and mercilessly mocking him, up and down, in hundreds of comments.
I’m sorry you were late, and missed participating, but simply wildly spinning around trying to find people who will argue with you about him is pretty silly, and this isn’t the right place to look; why don’t you try RedState, or some wholeheartedly rightwing blog? There’s no shortage of such sites, I’m sure you’d have an enjoyable time telling them all what asses they are, rather than trying to find targets to vent your hostility, anger, and aggression on here.
Then I shall continue to be rather bored and annoyed by your comments.
Here’s some friendly advice: scroll past.
Really, it’s not a big deal to me.
(shrugs)
“Feel free to reply substantively to my comments, though.”
I think probably I’m done; you’re, it’s become clear, a troll. Trolls get ignored, not fed. Sorry.
If you want to come back some time when your topic isn’t “why aren’t you people nasty enough?,” you’ll have a chance at a second impression. I’m done with my first.
I suggest others follow the usual troll procedures. Especially when Michael, in frustration at being ignored, starts to ramp up his trolling and nastiness, as is the usual course trolls follow when they’re ignored.
Von’s update is appreciated. I note that one of the points I made to him in our discussion earlier was that Clinton’s lie, while under oath, did have the minimal virtue of at least not exposing anyone else to condemnation. If Clinton had gotten away with it, for example, his loyalists would not have gone out and attacked anyone on his behalf; they simply would have continued to believe he was innocent of any sexual improprieties. On the other hand, if Ben had gotten away with it, his former editors at W&M stood accused of working plagiarized language into his articles, and the WaPo stood accused of forcing his resignation for no good reason. Shifting responsibility to innocent parties via lies, I would postulate, is worse than merely issuing false denials of responsibility.
[Regrettably necessary caveat: I am not saying that falsely denying responsibility, whether under oath or otherwise, is justifiable! Really!]
I don’t blame von for not being aware of all the facts, any more than I blame the RS posters whose reaction, based upon a limited understanding of the charges, was “it was one movie review in college! who cares!” One thing about friendship is that when your friend stands accused, even if you intend to be entirely fair-minded about the claims, you don’t typically go out in the world and try to gather more evidence against him. On the other hand, folks like Leon who looked at two nearly identical paragraphs and said “sorry, I just don’t see any evidence of plagiarism there,” that I would term as a tragic denial.
Finally, I will just say that even if the entire left is a baying pack of hateful coyotes, I still don’t think any ideology with which hilzoy identifies can be all wrong.
“I wasn’t talking about Ben specifically. My question is broader than that.”
Allow me to provide a mirror.
manyoso as if he were Michael Hubl:
Michael, why on earth wouldn’t you be talking about Ben specifically?! He’s only the most plagiarizing plagiarist that ever lived! He is symptomatic of all that is wrong with this country and yet, here you are Michael, REFUSING to talk about Ben specifically. How shameful. You act like you care, but obviously you do not.
“Then I shall continue to be rather bored and annoyed by your comments.”
I have to confess that the potential spectacle of watching Michael denounce Jes for insufficient vigor in criticizing Bush supporters makes me want to toss popcorn in the microwave.
Steve: I don’t blame von for not being aware of all the facts
Nor would I. No one can read everything. But from the wording of Von’s update, it suggests he was aware that Domenech had cast the blame on others: he just wasn’t paying attention to what that meant.
Good update, von.
What should have appeared on RedState was something that included this: “We have asked Ben to take a leave of absence” or “Ben has asked to take a leave of absence and we think that is appropriate” while not including all the praise for his character.
The folks in charge of RedState, Ben’s friends, could support him fervently and without criticism behind the scenes, but I think they hurt the website by not being more clear about the right and wrong in this situation.
Now, am I worried that the site has been damanged? Nope. Not a bit.
Careless of me, again. That should be:
If that isn’t your cup of tea, so be it. But, why would you insist that every blog take up the mantle of the lefty activist?
I’m not insisting on any such thing.
(Question: is raising an obvious strawman “civil”?)
I’m *asking* for an explanation of what is a palpable hypocricy: this site spends an inordinate amount of time congratulating itself on “civil discourse” and yet cannot seem to wrap its collective head around the idea that its the lying and willful ignorance on the part of a demonstrably inept mainstream media that represents the overwhelming majority of incivil discourse.
You see, I’m not making stuff up or peddling pure garbage and smearing large numbers of people to promote an ideology. But you know who was?
Ben Domenech. That was plain before any of this plagarism stuff got started. And he was hired by the WaPo, who played a significant role in peddling the Bush Administrations pre-war propaganda among other bogus agenda items on the Bush Admin’s list.
My point again: if incivility is so freaking important that y’all have to get hissy whenever a blog commenter tells you to “grow up” then how could you sit back when genuine lowlifes like Ben Domenech are given a giant microphone for preaching truly vile garbage?
You can choose to ignore the hypocricy if you want. I wouldn’t be suprised if you did. You could simply ban me and end the discussion and go on with your “civil” discussion about “Who is worse: Bill Clinton or Ben Domenech.”
That would be a pathetic and childish move on your part, but I wouldn’t blame you nor would I be terribly surprised.
As always: just my opinion. Feel free to rebut and try to focus on the substance. I’m not quoting Bible passages here and I’m not a fundamentalist. I can change my mind.
Or you can admit the hypocricy and apologize.
Then my head might explode.
Anderson it isn’t obtuseness so much as not being satisfied with conjecture based more on assumptions, even [gasp] prejudice, about republicans than any facts. This bio of the senior Domenech doesn’t sound much like the well connected noblesse oblige everyone assumes:
http://www.leesburg2day.com/current.cfm?catid=17&newsid=4599
I also don’t know which Domenech worked in the Admin first, maybe Dad is grateful for Ben’s connections. Maybe not. I have no idea.
Or you can admit the hypocricy and apologize.
Then my head might explode.
Can we vote on this?
Tacitus’s homeschooling post, by the way, was irredeemably banal. Seriously, he could have expressed the exact same thought simply by saying: “They hate us for our freedoms.” They being the left, in this case. It was an attempt to shape a few uncivil cheap shots into a narrative that, if you homeschool, “the left” hates you and it is imperative that you oppose them at all costs. From where I sit, far too much of Republican political dialogue is driven by exhortations that “if you are a person of faith, the left hates you” and the like.
On a blog like this one, with much civil dialogue and cross-pollination between different ideologies, one would think the principle that nothing is ever accomplished through unitary references to what ‘the left’ or ‘the right’ believes would have long since become an article of faith.
Von,
There’s no evidence that (and no grounds to call) the guy a racist, however.
You are a lawyer correct? You should know better than the above statement. You may not find the evidence compelling, but it’s there. (dispute of material fact, yadda yadda…)
As to the rest of your post, I disagree strongly, and will simply adopt by reference the issues mentioned upthread, emphasising my objection to the appeal to the “Left is mean” meme, which is dubious in general and spectacularly inapt in this case – something about ‘unclean hands’ comes to mind.
it’s because you’re here, not because any incivility anywhere would provoke the same response. (I mean: I’m sure that somewhere in, say, Kansas, someone is being uncivil at this very moment, and I am not condemning them. Sorry: life is short.)
Hi Hilzoy.
Again: the issue is not whether you spent enough time documenting (or re-documenting) Ben Domenech’s bizarre fetish for plagiarizing.
And the strawman about criticizing people in Kansas is noted (again: is erecting strawman “civil” discourse? How about mocking someone’s comments imitating them? Is that “civil” discourse?).
I’m not talking about some sad rube in Kansas who recites Republican scripts (for the record, there must be a million such people). I’m talking about our government and major newspapers and their writers.
I’m sure you’ll recognize there is a distinction and that your response was an example of dissembling to avoid the issue, to some extent.
Mac: I also don’t know which Domenech worked in the Admin first, maybe Dad is grateful for Ben’s connections. Maybe not. I have no idea.
As linked above in this thread, Dad was appointed in 2001.
I never meant to suggest that Ben was going to be given a sinecure (say, FEMA chief?) that would keep him safe & happy the rest of his days. But as someone safely outside any networks of influence, I’ve observed that they come in very handy for those on the inside.
Nor did I imply anything about Republicans in particular, tho as the party in power, they do have a bouncier safety net.
steve
On a blog like this one, with much civil dialogue and cross-pollination between different ideologies, one would think the principle that nothing is ever accomplished through unitary references to what ‘the left’ or ‘the right’ believes would have long since become an article of faith.
Hear hear. And this is exactly why Ben Domenech was a major problem long before this plagiarism garbage.
Michael :
I’m getting the sense that any prolonged disagreement with certain folks around here will ultimately be considered “uncivil”, i.e., the charge of “uncivil” is merely an excuse for censoring and ignoring the substance of the charges being levelled by the commenter.
I can assure you that is not the case here. If you will allow that 2-3 months counts as “prolonged”, I can tell you that more often than not I disagree vehemently with both front page posts and many comments here.
I make my opinions known and I have never been treated with anything but respect. Differing opinions and reasoned argument are welcome here. I am treated more civilly here than at sites that would seem to be more in alignment with my beliefs and opinions.
BUT – be prepared to back up what you opine. There are some very sharp folks here who have taken me to the woodshed on occasion. Take that for what you feel it is worth, from someone across the isle.
Tacitus’s homeschooling post, by the way, was irredeemably banal.
He had a point. Trevino *is* pompous and hateful, which is why I quit commenting at Tacitus.org, but it *is* also true that many libs see Christian-fundamentalist homeschooling as little short of retreating to a bunker in the Appalachians with plenty of bottled water & shotgun shells.
Having kids myself makes me more open-minded than I used to be about homeschooling. I still think it’s usually a bad idea, but hey, it’s a free country.
(I should’ve added “whereas Anderson is lighthearted and spiteful.”)
Michael: I wasn’t going to respond again, but: first, did you actually click the links? They are to the two posts I wrote during the period between when Domenech got his job and when I started writing about him.
Second, if you’re going to accuse me of dissembling, or any other form of dishonesty, you should realize that that’s either uncivil, and thus in violation of the posting rules, or in need of evidence. I will not ban you for criticizing me; I’m just saying.
Third, you’re misspelling ‘hypocrisy’.
it *is* also true that many libs see Christian-fundamentalist homeschooling as little short of retreating to a bunker in the Appalachians with plenty of bottled water & shotgun shells.
Care to provide support for that statement — (outside of some anonymous blog commenter making a wisecrack of course)?
As for the idea that Christian-fundie homeschooling is an effort on the part of fundie parents to shield their children from rational challenges to religious mythology and to promote religion-based bigotry against groups such as gays, scientists and “liberals”, that is a fairly reasonable idea, isn’t it?
Having kids myself makes me more open-minded than I used to be about homeschooling. I still think it’s usually a bad idea, but hey, it’s a free country.
Gay science teachers in Appalachia might take issue with that cheerful sentiment.
But more importantly, it should be recognized that the children of fundamentalists aren’t free to choose whether they are to be brainwashed by their parents or not.
And, yeah, telling a little kid that you must believe something or risk going to hell where you’ll be tortured by demons for eternity and never see mommy and daddy again is brainwashing.
And fourth, you are saying it about Hilzoy, which is really, really funny.
I won’t disagree that you’ll find plenty on the left who are apt to think homeschooling is something to laugh at.
Just as I’m sure you’ll find plenty on the right who are apt to think receiving a degree from an Ivy league school is something to snicker at and scorn.
But look at Trevino here. He notes the proclivity to make fun of homeschooling on the left and then makes the following charge of the left in lieu of this:
We’re opposed to parents. With emphasis.
That’s right folks. We snicker at homeschooling therefore we do not love our own mothers.
Charming, isn’t it?
Hilzoy
Second, if you’re going to accuse me of dissembling, or any other form of dishonesty, you should realize that that’s either uncivil, and thus in violation of the posting rules, or in need of evidence. I will not ban you for criticizing me; I’m just saying.
Thanks for not banning me for criticizing you.
As I stated, your comment about whether you should be expected to criticize folks in Kansas seems like a strawman to me and an attempt to miss the obvious point of my comment. Erecting strawmen is a form of dissembling, in my opinion.
Michael, for heaven’s sake.
It is generally accepted (here, at least) that you cannot attack someone for what they do not write about. You are attacking this blog in general, and Hilzoy in particular, because there were no posts about Ben Domenech getting the job at washingtonpost.com. That’s a ridiculous criticism to make, and you are pressing it with an annoying lack of civility.
Michael: if anyone did you, it would be for uncivil criticism, not criticism per se.
What I meant about Kansas was just: I do not bother to criticize every act of incivility there is. I criticize some. You are welcome to go back and check. But obviously not all. I saw no reason to think that the Post’s hiring an unqualified winger was either the most important or the most interesting story out there at first, and for whatever reason, it was also not the one I felt like writing about.
(I should’ve added “whereas Anderson is lighthearted and spiteful.”)
…whereas I’m pompous and lighthearted, no small feat.
Hilzoy
I wasn’t going to respond again, but: first, did you actually click the links? They are to the two posts I wrote during the period between when Domenech got his job and when I started writing about him.
I did click the links. They prove my point, especially the second one which seems little more than self-congratulation again on the oh-so-high ground allegedly taken by the this blog.
Is there an admission anywhere that this blog should have recognized earlier that Ben Domenech’s hiring was a debacle-in-the-making? Was there any commentary on the Domenech hiring prior to the plagiarism charges?
Moving on, there is actually a very good post at Redstate on this topic: which is, unsurprisingly, being slammed by regular RS commenters.
it *is* also true that many libs see Christian-fundamentalist homeschooling as little short of retreating to a bunker in the Appalachians with plenty of bottled water & shotgun shells.
“Many” is the word that always gets us into trouble. “Many” liberals believe 9/11 was an inside job. “Many” conservatives believe George Bush was sent by God to lead our nation. And so forth.
Is it an animating principle of the entire political left, or any significant majority thereof, that homeschooling is evil? Of course not. And yet Tacitus seized upon an opportunity to use a few blog comments to smear the entire liberal movement. It’s just cheap of him, and the fact that the charge could be fairly made as to a few isolated liberals makes it no less cheap. The Internet equivalent of those election-time fliers that say the secular liberals want to burn your Bible.
I think there are a lot of homeschoolers who come from the far right and a lot who come from the far left, not to mention those who have completely non-political reasons. I do wonder what some of the far-right homeschoolers would think if they realized the right to control your child’s education was one of the first unenumerated rights ever read into the Constitution by a bunch of activist Supreme Court justices. It’s a funny world.
Jesurgislac: tee hee
Notice that Reg feels obliged to condemn the internet left as “despicable people for whom nothing is beyond the pale in pursuit of their political ends…”
Of course, this does not provide anywhere near the necessary annoculation for what he goes on to say.
Is there an admission anywhere that this blog should have recognized earlier that Ben Domenech’s hiring was a debacle-in-the-making?
No, and there isn’t going to be one, because there was no such obligation on the part of this blog.
As Dean Wurmer said, “Obtuse and sanctimonious is no way to go through life, son.”
I know, civility.
I saw no reason to think that the Post’s hiring an unqualified winger was either the most important or the most interesting story out there at first, and for whatever reason, it was also not the one I felt like writing about.
Yes. Exactly.
But then folks here can’t resist jumping up and down and waving their kleenexes when someone tells someone else to “grow up” in the comments.
I find that fascinating and weird. I’m not sure why you don’t.
My point again: if those who run this blog truly care about the rotten state of discourse in this country, then show that you care by paying attention to the glaring examples of failures — like Ben Domenech — instead of making petty comments about the “rudeness” of comments on your blog.
Get it?
Some people in this country really are willfully ignorant liars. Some people in the comments section and at the WaPo really do behave like five year olds and pretend to be stupider than any adult could possibly be.
Recognizing the exisence of such people and identifying them is not “rude.”
It’s necessary. Pretending that they don’t exist is coddling.
“Many” is the word that always gets us into trouble.
I see your point, Steve, but I disagree. “Some” and “many” are valuable terms that keep us from the all-or-nothing disjunctive logic that characterizes blind partisanship.
As for Trevino, he was commenting over at DeLong for some reason. Apparently he thinks that if Domenech was beneath one’s notice before he became known as a Post-blogging plagiarist liar, then one mustn’t criticize him publicly. What’s Trevino’s excuse, then? Who knows.
Michael Hubl: Are you serious when you say that you don’t see any connection between characters like Ben Domenech and George Deutsch and more visible propagandists that peddle the Bush Administration’s talking points?
[sorry about the delay — I got a phone call.]
The story of George Deutsch or the more general appointment of incompetents, cronies, whatnot in, say, the CPA in Iraq or FEMA, seems like a different topic to me. Perhaps Ben Domenech was (maybe even still is) on the road to such jobs, that is a connection but I would say a tenuous one.
As for incivility on the left and right, well, I have my own opinion which I have expressed before (that is, the right tends to be somewhat worse). But that opinion is not worth much. I would rather stick to specific cases.
I guess I just don’t have much to say on this subject. So here some more empty words. I would rather talk about something else.
No, and there isn’t going to be one, because there was no such obligation on the part of this blog.
Maybe the blog isn’t “about” what someone thought it was “about” then.
Or maybe it’s just falling short of its goals.
Anything is possible, I guess. (shrugs)
MIchael, you have somehow talked yourself into believing that most of the commenters here are Bush supporters and that it’s up to you to stand up for truth. I’ve been lurking and I think I agree with what you say when you talk about substance, but your arguments with other commenters are absurd–for instance, Jesurgislac is one of the most outspoken Bush critics around here (which I mean as both objective description and as a compliment) and you’ve managed to tick her off. Take a deep breath and consider the possibility that you’re misjudging people.
It happens–I’ve done it myself a few times.
By the way, I have mixed feelings about civility in political debates, but it would take me a few badly written paragraphs to explain. Suffice it to say I think it is often an overrated virtue–in fact, one that often allows people to get away with murder, because it’s uncivil to accuse people of being mass murderers. But Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld aren’t posting in this thread so it shouldn’t be that difficult to disagree with people without being disagreeable.
I see your point, Steve, but I disagree. “Some” and “many” are valuable terms that keep us from the all-or-nothing disjunctive logic that characterizes blind partisanship.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t use the word “many.” Maybe I should have said that “many” gets us into trouble “much” of the time. Tee hee.
The point is that saying “many liberals believe this” or “many conservatives believe that” is shorthand for saying “enough of them believe this that we should care about it.” Sometimes the shorthand is born out of laziness; sometimes it is born out of a wilful desire to take a cheap shot.
My bottom line is that it is not the word “many” which is an offender; the offender is the person who uses “many” to obscure the fact that he is, in point of fact, complaining about nothing more than a few extremists. Although, maybe my example that “many conservatives believe George Bush was sent by God” was poorly chosen in that regard…
My bottom line is that it is not the word “many” which is an offender; the offender is the person who uses “many” to obscure the fact that he is, in point of fact, complaining about nothing more than a few extremists. Although, maybe my example that “many conservatives believe George Bush was sent by God” was poorly chosen in that regard…
As I recall, George himself believes that he was chosen by God to be President.
Certainly there can be no doubt that in George’s mind God allowed him to be President. And in George’s mind, that has to be worth something.
Now I need to take a shower.
Certainly there can be no doubt that in George’s mind God allowed him to be President.
God has of course allowed all manner of people to hold power.
George W. Bush, the Scourge of God?
Although, maybe my example that “many conservatives believe George Bush was sent by God” was poorly chosen in that regard…
Ah, but some do.
As for the ongoing debate over the role of this blog in promoting civil discourse, I always thought the animating concept was to simply lead by example, rather than to take responsibility for cleansing the entirety of our political debate, as if hilzoy were some cross between Don Quixote and Hercules cleansing the Augean stables. But she will correct me if I am wrong.
Steve: You are! You are! I had never previously thought of myself as a cross between Don Quixote and Hercules, but now that you mention it, I am!!!
Also, I am the world spirit, and have finally come to self-awareness.
History ends. Curtain down. Thank you all very much 😉
I had this quote from George Pataki in mind, actually.
“Ladies and Gentlemen …
On this night and in this fight there is another who holds high that torch
of freedom. He is one of those men God and fate somehow lead to the fore in times of challenge.
And he is lighting the way to better times, a safer land, and hope.
He is my friend, he is our president, President George W. Bush.”
I don’t believe it’s out of the mainstream at all to believe God has a plan for America, to tell you the truth, or that America’s leadership plays a part in that plan. I do think it’s a bit arrogant for any political party to claim that they are fulfilling God’s plan, but I don’t get to set the rules.
Oops, and now I stepped all over hilzoy’s stunning denouement. Humblest apologies to the World Spirit, and congratulations to all on a happy ending.
Oh. My. Gawd.
It was the GENERAL! HE did it! He’s the one who suggested that Red Dawn is porn for Young Republicans (my words, not his) and that certain incestuous relations might follow. Here is the link.
Jesus’ General.
Jake
Jake, the General has finally gotten around to answering this scandal:
My response to the vile bastards who are trying to destroy America by destroying me
Man, I missed all the fun stuff.
Well, it does say that you have to forgive them. What it DOESN’T say is that you have to trust them again. The concept of ‘forgiveness’ in Scripture is about letting-go-of-offences, of releasing anger and bitterness, of freeing yourself from the bile of vengeful emotion as much as it is granting some reprieve to a sinner.
As for the whole ‘graciousness is weakness’ meme, well, yeah. Tough nuts. I’d repaste an essay I wrote on the topic a while back, but I don’t want to break posting rules. Links are fine, though. Sometimes, you have t be willing to do what’s Good, and lose because of it.
Jeff: that’s quite good.
I also think, though (not a disagreement so much as a separate topic) that the tactical uses of doing the right thing are underappreciated. I often (when teaching) run into the assumption that winning absolutely requires doing wrong; and I think this is just a blind prejudice.
Not that the tactical reasons are why one should do the right thing, but recognizing their possibility helps when arguing with some supposedly realistic person who take realism to involve amorality.
hilzoy – I agree wholeheartedly. In many cases, doing the right thing is both morally and ethically correct and also tactically wise. You’re right, though, that one’s motivation for ‘doing right’ ultimately becomes the sticking point. I think my piece was mostly motivated by the endless spiral of ‘They fought dirty, so we had to’ that continues ad infitum, with no one ever remembering how the dirty fighting even started…
Jeff, I resent your insinuations against the Cthulu Reform Ticket.
First of all, it’s the “Cthulhu Reform Party.” Please. Spell our Elder God’s name correctly, at least.
Furthermore, why vote for a lesser evil?
Jeff: yes; it bothers me a lot too. I just find myself protesting both of the mistaken assumptions.
I mean: just to change the subject entirely, I ask myself why on earth we had to end up having the Cold War spill over into the third world. (Our being rivals with the USSR: probably inevitable; the Cold War being fought in Europe: ditto. But Africa? Asia?) We had every imaginable advantage over the USSR: a better ideology, for starters, and the financial and military resources to ensure that no one ended up siding with the USSR just because they HAD to.
What if we had just made it our policy to really try to help any country who wanted to become a democracy to do so, without insisting on their taking orders from us, helping our our commercial interests, and so forth. No helping our ex-allies to keep their colonies (though it’s not as though we weren’t helping them in lots of other ways, like, oh, the Marshall plan); no coups in Guatemala and so forth: just a serious attempt to stick to our values and put some resources behind the attempt.
I think this would have been enormously in our interests. And I suspect that part of the reason we didn’t do anything like that was because there were people saying: hey, we have to be hard-headed realists now, and play serious realpolitik.
Hah.
Spell our Elder God’s name correctly, at least.
Gary, I’d be reeeeeeal careful spelling out those Names. I mean, damn, next you’ll be typing out H-st-r, and the world will come to an end.
Jeff’s caution is admirable.
Michael, when I said this site is “about” civil discourse, I meant that that’s what commenters practice — or try to practice — here. I did not mean that the site was about ridding the world, or the US political scene, or anything else, of incivility. If Ben Domenech came to the site and posted in comments some of the things he’s posted on his blogs, he would receive a much harsher welcome than you did. But he hasn’t.
It’s quite possible to discuss lying and propaganda and attacks on science and whatever else might be the Obviously Most Important Topic That Must Be Discussed Right This Moment to the Exclusion of Anything Else without engaging in incivility oneself. The theory of our hosts here is that maintaining some level of politeness leads to more productive discussions rather than shouting matches in which no one is ever convinced of anything or experiences a new thought. That may or may not be the best way of doing things, but it’s the way things are here.
Try it. You might like it. If not, there are plenty of other blogs out there to vent on.
“And I suspect that part of the reason we didn’t do anything like that was because there were people saying: hey, we have to be hard-headed realists now, and play serious realpolitik.”
Paul Berman calls this “the romance of the ruthless.” (I just posted a link to this on the little used open thread, but here’s another opening.)
And yet Tacitus seized upon an opportunity to use a few blog comments to smear the entire liberal movement. It’s just cheap of him . . .
Trevino? Pshaw. It’s de rigeur.
Well, fair enough. Margaret Cho’s dog and all. But Trevino makes enough intellectually honest comments that you really feel like he should be capable of better.
But Trevino makes enough intellectually honest comments that you really feel like he should be capable of better.
Yeah, that’s exactly what p.o.’s me about him, now that you put it like that. He is clearly capable of doing better, he just chooses not to.
His contempt for ObWi is telling in that respect–he would do so much better amidst a mix of ideas, but confines himself to echo chambers & ends up adopting that us/them crap.
Morning all, and thanks for the update, Von. I would suggest that when you make an update, if you would just put a short note in the comments at the same time, it might be A Good Thing. I suspect that this thread (and threads like this) get heated because people go to the last comment and then back up. I’d like to think that knowing about the update might cool things off a bit.
“I’d like to think that knowing about the update might cool things off a bit.”
I’d like to think that people might feel cooler about Von if he’d actually revise what he said about most people on the left.
It would also be useful if Von would bother to show enough interest in his own blog to show up for discussions in it, and actually respond to people more than once or twice with a dozen or two dozen words.
A lot of people take an interest in ObWi. A shame that most of the actual blog-owners don’t seem to take a tenth as much interest. (I’m not saying they have to be obsessive; I’m saying that more than 2 posts and 6 comments, or so, a month, isn’t very much, and that’s all; but my starting point was that one defuses conversations by bothering to participate in them.)
To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.
Just a reminder of the guy who von can’t wait to see get a second shot.
The plagiarism, I can easily forgive. This comment, not so much.
Well, I say we get back to bashing America! Who’s with me?
Haha. By his standards that actually his how I’m spending my weekend. (Reading through hundreds of pages of CSRT transcripts from Guantanamo.)
Gary, I tend to agree with your point here, but jumping up and down on von is clearly not working, so it might be better if we let this one go, if only to give some newcomers the swinging room they seem to require. Of course, everyone is cordially invited to HoCB if they still have some snark to get out of their system.
But I do have to add, when I saw this
Gay science teachers in Appalachia might take issue with that cheerful sentiment.
I had the overwhelming urge to say ‘name two’. That is all.
I managed never to have looked at this and wow does it make me not happy.
Anarch: I was not asserting moral equivalence, just preemptively acknowledging that hilzoy’s law of large numbers applies, and thus that if someone wants to produce an example of some totally offensive comment from the left, I won’t be surprised.
Oh, I know. I wasn’t criticizing you, just airing a particular pet peeve of mine: letting the existence proof stand in for something meaningful (pace ral‘s pithier formulation).
I managed never to have looked at this and wow does it make me not happy.
I’m still managing not to look at this, and apparently this is making me happy by comparison.
Gary: “It would also be useful if Von would bother to show enough interest in his own blog to show up for discussions in it, and actually respond to people more than once or twice with a dozen or two dozen words.”
von just had his first child. Rumor has it that takes a lot of time. I think it might be a good time to cut him some slack — at least until his child starts sleeping through the night.
“Gary, I tend to agree with your point here, but jumping up and down on von is clearly not working….”
Apparently not, though I retain some mild hope for the future. But obviously I was having an Irritable Moment.
I do wish that when Mr. Domenech cut and pastes, he’d at least learn to paragraph. But we already knew he knew how to cut and paste; at least that time he linked to what he was quoting.
“von just had his first child. Rumor has it that takes a lot of time. I think it might be a good time to cut him some slack — at least until his child starts sleeping through the night.”
Fair enough. And congrats to him for all that, of course.
Speaking as a man, I imagine it WOULD take a lot of time for one of us to have a child.
Note that the paragraphing, lack thereof rather, comes from the (execrable, unless I’m entirely confused) source he links.
Hey everyone, it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood! Or it is here in Japan, anyhow. How about an open thread on books, or travel, or movies, or recipes, or something, to divert our eyes from this train wreck for a while?
Tim Rutten covers the BD story. It’s a pretty decent summary.
“How about an open thread on books, or travel, or movies, or recipes, or something, to divert our eyes from this train wreck for a while?”
There’s one right here.
Von, here is a piece on Domenech from a conservative with a different approach then yours. Unsurprisingly, I think Surber has a better grasp of the matter (and the facts).
it is here in Japan, anyhow
!!!
You in Tokyo or Nagoya? It’s raining down here in beartown
Skimming quickly through the comments about Clinton’s lie, I don’t see this point mentioned (and I’m sorry but at the moment I don’t have the time to research it, either on google or wikipedia): didn’t the trial judge rule that Clinton’s lie was not germane to the suit and therefore did not rise to the level of perjury?
If this is so, does it affect the quality of apology Clinton needed to deliver?
LJ: Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, actually. Teaching with JET.
Now, so do I.
Jeebus.
Geez, small world, mc. Drop a line to my gmail and if you are ever in Kumamoto, let me know.
Three words for him: anger management class.
Though the blogosphere really desperately needs self-righteousness managment classes. And I’m not saying I don’t need some myself on occasion. But I do like to think that I manage to remember most of the time that self-righteousness doesn’t justify just saying and doing anything and everything, just because the Cause Is Just. I prefer to think that I tend to restrain my own self-righteousness mostly to actual *ssh*les. Though, of course, sometimes I don’t, and that’s my bad.
If Ben wants to be a journalist, he should probably give up his Regnery job, and go back to WaPo, on bended knee and with hat in hand, and beg for a job on the city desk.
Real reporting on daily events, that would bring him into contact with regular people, not important GOP friends-of-Dad.
If he does well, and stays within the bounds of professionalism, I think he’d get his cred back.
Eventually, he could get back into the column-writing biz, and at that point, I suspect his time reporting the hard-luck stories of the plebes would give him depth and credibility that his pampered peers lack.
On the other hand, if he just wants to score political points for his GOP elders, he can stay at Regnery and RedState.
“But I do like to think that I manage to remember most of the time that self-righteousness doesn’t justify just saying and doing anything and everything, just because the Cause Is Just.”
My lesson from comments like the ‘if they all died today’ thing on redstate.com is that you can do what is good for your cause or you can have a public fit of self-righteous anger but often you can’t do both.
Seb: yes.
Though I think that anger, properly deployed, can be extremely useful. Some of the posts I’ve written that I like best were written in anger. (For instance, ‘Hatred Is A Poison’, ‘Another Response To A Letter At Horsefeathers’, and more or less everything I’ve written about torture and the Graham amendment.)
The trick is to use it: to govern it instead of letting it govern you. My anger, at least, tends to get a bit testy when I don;t make myself stop and ask: who, exactly, is the appropriate target of this anger, if there is one? What, exactly, am I angry about, really? And why? — and then try to shape an appropriate response. “Wait”, it says when I’m tempted to be more sloppy: “I am your anger, damn it, and I deserve more respect than that! I shouldn’t just be deployed indiscriminately!” Whenever I ignore its warnings, I find myself regretting it later.
This is lucky, since it means I don’t have to ignore my anger itself, either, or pretend that everything is all OK when it isn’t. But it would be an equal mistake not to figure out what, exactly, the problem really is, and just get mad at whatever occurred to me first.
(In a way, I think emotions are like young kids: their first idea of what they want is often wrong, and they will not thank you for giving in to, for instance, their demands for all the candy in the store.)
I think it’s crazily indiscriminate to say that you wouldn’t mind if all the left dropped dead — unless Thomas really believes, as a lot of the commenters at RedState say they do, that everyone on the left is a nihilistic howling pack of hyenas out for blood — an especially scary thought since a lot of them also seem to think that the world of moonbats is large enough to include Michelle Malkin. If he doesn’t believe that, though, he needs to think a lot harder about who he’s mad at, in particular, and what he actually wishes on them.
It’s not that he wrote while he was angry; it’s that he didn’t respect his anger enough to govern it.
OT: We have been linked to by, of all people, Roger Ebert. First Malkin, then Domenech, now this. Yikes.
“The trick is to use it: to govern it instead of letting it govern you.”
This is what made Mace Windu so powerful, you see.
(I’m kidding, but half-serious, in that I spent a few hours on a couple of occasions poking around the Star Wars websites reading trivial crap back when the last movie came out; supposedly Windu’s flavor of Jedi practice pushed him up towards the edge of the Dark Side, in using anger, but not over the edge; this made his style a bit questionable in the eyes of other Jedi, said the article, but also made him Powerful.)
“…since a lot of them also seem to think that the world of moonbats is large enough to include Michelle Malkin.”
She is, but not in the way they think she is. But I think you’re a very impressive — for a certain value of the word sort of “conservative” when Michelle Malkin isn’t conservative and passionate and loyal enough for you.
Although, in fairness, I think a lot of them (at RedState) simply don’t “get” plagiarism at all, and that it wasn’t, in all cases at all times, just loyalty to Domenech; I’m willing to grant that there was a considerable amount of simple ignorance and stupidity involved, as well — see how generous I am?
The whole endless reiteration of “I have my finger on the trigger, and I’m ready to blam/ban you any minute now!” stuff also tends to suggest an immense amount of getting carried away with The Mighty Power Of Control; it’s ugly stuff, but I’m willing to grant that a teeny bit of it is just inexperience — but not very much, because any sane and reasonable person simply wouldn’t go there, no matter that the whole experience is brand new to them — sane and reasonable people can analogize from other experiences to new experiences in figuring out what’s actually righteous behavior, versus self-righteous behavior.
Frankly, most of those people just don’t seem either very bright or very grown-up. And I don’t say that as an ideological thing; I’ve seen more than my share of idiotic leftists, certainly.
But I’m afraid I’m something of an intellectual elitist, even if I’m a poor imitation of a pseudo-intellectual, myself; I don’t let that get in the way of my elitism, or as other call it, my snottiness. I like people who can use their words, and, like, spell, ‘n everything.
It’s going to take me a while to absorb the notion of Michelle Malkin as a wimp seeking the approval of leftists, I must confess. I’m still rather stunny about it (this would be the equivalent of “shocky,” if it were, you know, a word).
That’s not under Ebert’s byline, I think, just his brand.
“OT: We have been linked to by, of all people, Roger Ebert.”
You will now be the 9th person I’ve pointed out to in the last year that Jim Emerson is not Roger Ebert.
To expand slightly: the blog is not obscurely entitled “Emerson blog.” Right there at the top, in big letters. And on the main page: “Emerson Blog.” And on every piece, at the top: “Jim Emerson.”
Jim has been a film critic for longer than thirty years. He was an old hand when I first encountered him writing for the Seattle alternative weekly in 1978, and then when he moved to the Seattle Times a year or two later. I’ve been reading him that long.
Roger hired Jim to run the website when the website started a year and 3/4s, or two years, or such, ago. There are only two people on the site: Jim, and Roger.
I know it’s the “Roger Ebert” website, but Jim’s blog is clearly labeled, and everything he writes is signed and bylined, and not in small letters or at the bottom of the articles, and I don’t quite understand why so many people make this mistake, although I guess it’s just because it’s “rogerebert.com,” and there’s an expectation.
Anyway, Jim is a good writer, himself, and often does political commentary related to film on the blog. I’ve linked to him on a number of occasions, most recently, gee, way back the day before yesterday, and also last month.
But, what the hell, a month doesn’t go by that someone doesn’t link to the “amygdalagf blog,” too.
Oops; sorry. Emerson it is.
No amount of odious comments, however odious detract from:
1) There were substantive criticisms of Domenech’s opinion writing on RedState and their qualifications re: Red America re:Blog an WaPo prior to charges of plagiarism.
2) Charges of plagiarism accentuated the existing case of Ben’s lack of qualification for a prestigious position at WaPo online.
3) Charges of plagiarism were met with denial and false accusations of wrongdoing of others.
4) A post titled “Contrition” was not even passably contrite, and it acted as if the blatant lies and smears were merely “obfuscation”.
You have got to be kidding. How can we even have a debate about something so obvious and black and white? He has not a leg to stand on, and now we are talking about others civility? And decorum?
“the blog is not obscurely entitled “Emerson blog.” Right there at the top, in big letters.”
Gary, click the link. “Not obscurely” applies, as does “not”.
Pinko Punko: it’s sort of amazing, even taking into account the grief those who knew him, or even had the sort of I’ve-never-met-them-but-if-someone-tried-to-harm-them-I-would-get-really-mad-and-try-to-kick-out-that-person’s-kneecaps relationship I have with my co-bloggers, must have felt. — I mean, in my world the left and right have some awful commenters, but some of the prominent right-wing bloggers have a level of venom that their left-wing analogs (in terms of size) do not begin to match. (I mean: who, exactly, is the left’s analog to Hindrocket?)
There probably is some Hindrocket doppelganger out there, but he toils in obscurity because no online Dem would take seriously a blog that said things like “This is yet another masterstroke by Harry Reid, the greatest Senate Minority Leader of the last two centuries, long may he reign…”
There probably is some Hindrocket doppelganger out there
Probably a guy with the goatee.
lj- Hey, what are you trying to imply?
Sorry, should have tossed in the link, but it came up a week or so ago. No insult to facial hair intended ;^)
lj- How could I have forgotten! None taken. 🙂
That link is hilarious, but how could the wiki community have forgotten the “evil twin” episode of Green Acres…
I’m not so impressed with this Wikipedia entry; I think the emphasis on science fiction is way overdone; I can’t think of any real science fiction that has used the trope. TV stuff isn’t real science fiction, save with a few exceptions, and Star Trek is hardly representative of science fiction.
Off-hand, I can’t think of a single major sf book or story that has an “evil twin” trope. Not before Star Trek and not afterwards.
Writing as if Star Trek was serious sf and representative of the field is just ludicrous, even if that’s what it means in the mind of some casual Wikipedia writers, or much of the general public.
Soap operas: that’s where you’ll find your real history of evil twins.
Not that I’m objecting at all the use of “bearded Spock” as a shorthand for the concept — not at all.
I’m just arguing with the Wikipedia entry’s phrasing “An evil twin is the concept in fiction (especially science fiction and fantasy),” since that’s really misleading in implying that it’s used in real science fiction, say, the way travel to other solar systems is, or cloning, or meeting aliens, or time travel, or any of the actually much-used tropes in science fiction.
But “bearded Spock” is a perfectly reasonable and useful popular shorthand.
Just to really beat the horse: that’s a long Wikipedia piece, and it provides a zillion examples of “evil twin” in pop culture, and not a single one, other than “Star Trek” is a science fiction story. No books, or written stories: nada, let alone any prominent ones. No other forms of sf, either; it’s all fantasy or superhero comics or children’s animation, or whatever. (No, Knight Rider is not serious science fiction.)
The first sentence just isn’t remotely supported by the article.
Easy, Gary. Maybe one of Ben Domenech’s editors inserted that line into the wiki…
Well, I’m not going to defend the article to the death, but it is fun to see all those different evil twin examples. I mean, the whole evil twin thing might go back to Plato’s Phaedrus (with the analogy of the two horses) or the Danaïdes (where the 50 sons of the evil twin descend on Argos to marry the 50 daughters and the daughters, to protect themselves, are ordered by the good twin to kill their husbands, which all but one of them does) or the explanation Plato has Aristophanes give, that men and women are actually two separated halves which are condemned to search for their missing half, or the whole Apollo/Dionysias split.
If you are interested, I’ll discuss my theory that the first template for literature was the buddy movie…
Ouch! Poor von.
Ouch! Poor von.
It’s gotta make contact to leave a welt. This one whiffed (i.e., I frankly don’t understand it).
This one whiffed (i.e., I frankly don’t understand it).
It’s that irony thing. You know: you going all “poor Ben, he’s suffered such odious and baseless attacks” after a series of odious and baseless attacks by Ben Domenech himself.
“(i.e., I frankly don’t understand it).”
The point is that you’re going (I paraphrase) “poor good old Ben, what a shame such awful things have been said about such a nice guy,” when others read his string of vicious fact-free attacks on others and see “a lot of truly baseless — and truly odious — attacks.”
The man is a master of hate rhetoric, and an overwhelming hypocrite, and that’s before we get to the plagiarism, and his lying smears of his former colleagues, and his other attempts to lie his way out of the situation until he was nailed.
This doesn’t make good old Ben appear terribly sympathetic to those who have read Ben’s attitudes of non-generosity towards others.
Have you read Domenech on plagiarists? On plagiarists who don’t show signs of guilt and shame and repetence? (And a last minute forced plea aren’t such signs.)
Ben Domenech:
He wants no quarter given to such people.
Fair enough. And what else?
Okey-dokey.
And I shouldn’t leave out that The Editors chose to highlight this: “there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.”
Unsurprisingly, Von — and I think I can read The Editors’ mind here — we on the left feel personally slandered by you.
Some of us still have hopes you’ll do the right thing, and withdraw and revise your slur on us; an apology would also be a nice sign of recognition of your un-called-for, untrue, slur.
I feel perfectly proud of everything I said about Domenech until the plagiarism issue, since I said nothing whatever. I ask again: please withdraw your slander against me and all the rest of us, and apologize. If you have people you want to castigate, name them and quote them.
Then we will stop being pissed off at you. Not before.
Here’s a clue: people who are lied about and insulted tend to not find it acceptable just because the person making the untrue slander thinks it’s fine because lots of his friends take it for granted that it’s true and already said it.
Would you be copacetic if I declared that “few on the Right aren’t vicious liars”?
Notice that I’ve never said any such thing. Or not.
You know: you going all “poor Ben, he’s suffered such odious and baseless attacks” after a series of odious and baseless attacks by Ben Domenech himself.
Ahh. Perhaps I didn’t emphasize the following enough (from my comment at 9:32 a.m. [EST] on 3/25):
Or, to distill it further: Two wrongs do not make a right. (It doesn’t matter that Domenech might not have extended the same courtesy to me. I try to live up to my own standards, not the standards of another.)
Unsurprisingly, Von — and I think I can read The Editors’ mind here — we on the left feel personally slandered by you.
I intended no slur, personal or otherwise.
von: since, having been exempted, I can speak with some detachment, when you say: “there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud”, I’m not sure how that could possibly not count as a slur on those people who should not feel proud. (I mean: presumably they should not feel proud for a reason. And what could that reason be if not that they had done something wrong? And how could saying that they had not be a slur?)
And, just to wrap that up, had you said “there are some on the left who should not feel proud”, I think most people would say: sure. That’s almost always true. But to say it about everyone on the left except for a small number (“not a lot”) is different.
OK, last last addition: I also think (mindreading) that people wouldn’t be bothered by this if, say, Thomas had said it. Ho hum, we’d say; what else is new? That people are bothered by it when you say it is, I think, due to respect for you.
“I intended no slur, personal or otherwise.”
I’m sure you didn’t. But you’ve made one, and you’ve yet to withdraw it. Do you really continue to not get this?
Would it be so hard to write something along the lines of “I shouldn’t have written ‘there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud,’ and made such a generalization about the left; I realize that I have no idea what most people on the left have said and written about Ben Domenech, and now that I think about it, I realize that most people on the left said nothing whatever about him; they have nothing to regret, and I apologize that I implied that they did; I gathered an impression that there were some people on the left who said terrible things about Ben, but I was trusting the assertions of friends there, and didn’t take the time to actually look into who said what myself — I’m pretty busy these days with more important things than blog kerfuffles; I also nonetheless regret that I didn’t make myself familiar with the true range of what those on the left said about Domenech; here are examples of comments from leftists I do think were out of line; I condemn those people, but I don’t condemn anyone else simply for being on the left, any more than I want to be judged by the writings of Ben Domenech’s, even though Ben remains my friend, and I believe he is redeemable and will in future do good work that makes up for his youthful errors.”
Something like that?
But slurring people, and then saying “I didn’t mean to slur you [but I stand by my slurs]” doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid.
Notice that I’m still trying to work with you here. I believe you’re a responsible person who will, sooner or later, think about what he said, and take responsibility for it. I don’t think you’re anything like a Ben Domenech. But help me out here, please.
“That people are bothered by it when you say it is, I think, due to respect for you.”
Absolutely, and to the rest of what Hilzoy said (though she’s emphasizing for herself points already made).
I’m not trying to ride your ass to be obnoxious; I’m trying to get you to withdraw your slur. That you didn’t realize you were slurring people, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on. But intent and acts are, as you know, different things.
When you wrong someone or someones, not having intended to doesn’t make up for the wrong. When the wrong is with words, saying you didn’t mean the words to mean what they mean is good, but doesn’t change that they mean what they mean; if you want to not stand by the words, you have to say so. You have to specifically say you don’t mean those words; you can’t just say a variant of “you shouldn’t take them to mean what they mean, since that’s not what I meant.” You get to speak to what you meant in your heart and head; you don’t get to change the meaning of the words you wrote; those you can only withdraw or modify.
Please withdraw or modify them. Thanks.
Hilzoy (and Gary, by extension): This is getting really silly. I expressed an opinion. It happens in the blogosphere. Others disagreed. That happens too. Now, you’re telling me that you disagree so strongly with my opinion that you feel that it’s a personal slur. That wasn’t my intent, but fine; I can’t keep you from feeling what you feel. You then demand an apology. If my opinion changed, I would offer one. But it hasn’t, and so I can’t.
A lot of the pre-plagiarism attacks were policy disagreements made as personal assaults: e.g., you supported policy X and, therefore, you are a racist. Such an attack is not only inaccurate — e.g., supporting votor ID does not mean that one is a racist — and is not helpful to bridging the political divide.*
I don’t know whether Gary made such an attack because I haven’t read his site; since I neither did nor intended to single him out, I didn’t need to.** Again, not a lot on the left is not the same as everyone on the left or everyone on the left but Hilzoy. Please read the damn words and assume that they carry their ordinary meaning. Moreover, saying that one should not feel proud about something is not the same as saying that one is evil, or even that one should feel ashamed. It is saying that one should not feel proud.
In any event, Domenech’s career and personal reputation are in tatters — and deservedly so.
von
*It shouldn’t matter to this point, but, for clarity, I opposed voter ID on the ground that it had a disproportionate impact on African Americans with much corresponding anti-fraud benefit.)
**Nor am I going to, Gary.
That first footnote should be:
It shouldn’t matter to this point, but, for clarity, I opposed voter ID on the ground that it had a disproportionate impact on African Americans without much corresponding anti-fraud benefit.)
“Now, you’re telling me that you disagree so strongly with my opinion that you feel that it’s a personal slur.”
Not at all. No one is disagreeing with any of your opinions — not on this issue. You made a statement that is either fact-based, or not.
“…there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud.”
Now, “who should walk away from this one feeling proud” is the opinion part. That’s not at issue.
The fact-based (or needs to be) part: “there aren’t a lot.”
Either this is true, or it isn’t. Either most people on the left — those left when you subtract “not a lot,” which “a lot,” which is “most” — are people you are referring to, or not.
But that’s indisputable. It’s what you said.
You referred to the majority of people on the left; you said we “don’t have a lot to be proud of.”
You can’t claim that you weren’t referring to us with that phrasing. You can only claim that it was poor phrasing that didn’t reflect what you meant to say; that’s what I keep inviting you to correct and make clear.
“Again, not a lot on the left is not the same as everyone on the left or everyone on the left but Hilzoy.”
Correct. It’s the same as “most people on the left.” This simply isn’t deniable.
“Please read the damn words and assume that they carry their ordinary meaning.”
Indeed.
“If my opinion changed, I would offer one. But it hasn’t, and so I can’t.”
Is it still your opinion that “there aren’t a lot on the left who should walk away from this one feeling proud”?
If so, why? What’s the evidence you submit that those of us who are not in the few and the proud have done something to not be proud of?
It’s that simple. You’ve made a claim about the majority of leftists: what’s the evidence in support of your claim?
Please read the damn words and assume that they carry their ordinary meaning.
Well I read your words and assumed they carried their ordinary meaning, and I came to conclusion Gary and Hilzoy did too.
von: Please read the damn words and assume that they carry their ordinary meaning.
What Gary, hilzoy and spartikus said.
[I debated a more complete version of this post, but fortunately Gary beat me to it.]
von: In any event, Domenech’s career and personal reputation are in tatters — and deservedly so.
For the moment, yes. How long this lasts, and whether it will be accompanied by anything like redemption (or even atonement), is something that is still very open to question.
Wow Von that actually is starting to make some sense in my head. If you meant “proud” in the sense of feeling pride at the specific accomplishment of exposing Ben as a plagarist, then I can see where you thought many here wouldn’t be offended. I have to say I didn’t see that as a possibility until now.
For what it’s worth, I agree with Gary, Hilzoy, Spartikus, and Anarch. When you inspect a hurricane-damaged house and say “There isn’t a lot of this house that can be saved”, it doesn’t mean there’s only a little that needs to be demolished. It means most of the house needs to be torn down. That’s the “ordinary meaning” of the words.
If you didn’t mean your comment to apply to the vast majority of people on the left, then it would seem appropriate to have an update explaining what you did intend it to mean.
Well it’s nice to have it confirmed that you weren’t referring to any actual living breathing lefties, but only dispassionately describing some abstract archetype with no discernible members.
All the same, this is troubling. If the kitten has a mens rea clause, does that mean it’s safe for me to observe that most Republicans are facilitating a violent criminal enterprise bent on subverting the constitution?
Because, to be blunt, one of good things about this site is that saying stuff like that is frowned upon (cf. recent convos with Walter Concrete) even when they’re demonstrably true. And yet, here you are, not only saying stuff like that, but defending it. And — pardon me for mentioning this out loud because I’m sure it’s one of those things that we should all politely ignore — you are defending not by demonstrating something which you have asserted is demonstrably true, but by calling into question the reading comprehension of your audience. Which is occasionally a legitimate defense, but always a reason to be suspicious.
Of course if you’re using the actus non facit reum si republicus defense that I hear so much about lately, maybe I should just give up now…
Let me try one last time to make something clear here: I’m harassing you, Von, as an act of friendship. I’m trying to help you out, here.
I’m trying to get you on record as revising your unintentionally offensive statement to something inoffensive.
I’m trying to get you — though the quicker this could have been done, the better it would have been — to close this out so that those of us who are friends of yours can respond, when you’re mocked for having said an unjustifiable slur, “no, he revised his hasty words, which he wrote over-quickly.”
We’d prefer to be able to make that sort of statement about you when you’re mocked by people such as The Editors, simply by quoting your remarks.
We can’t do that if you don’t revise your remark.
We’d prefer to not have you thought of as “that asshole, Von,” though at this point we have to settle for “that hasty writer, Von, who is a bit slower to revise his errors than would be ideal.”
But we’re still working on it. I’m still trying to help you out.
(Similarly, Domenech was best helped by Malkin saying he needed to apologize and resign, not by the people who told him he had nothing to apologize for; I’m telling you you need to revise your remark; I know it hurts, but it’s doing you a favor as a friend, not to try to “get” you, much as I’m sure it seems otherwise to you just now.)
Me too
Moreover, saying that one should not feel proud about something is not the same as saying that one is evil, or even that one should feel ashamed. It is saying that one should not feel proud.
This seems a silly (dare I say lawyerly?) distinction that I sincerely doubt would occur to anyone reading the sentence in question. If we shouln’t be proud, but also shouldn’t feel shame, what should we feel? A general sense of ennui? When you complain about the (unspecified) baseless and odious attacks suffered by Ben, and immediately follow that up with an admonition that the left take no pride in their actions, the ordinary meaning of that is that they should instead be ashamed, not that they should just feel nothing in particular.
My last comment on this (I think): von wrote: “Now, you’re telling me that you disagree so strongly with my opinion that you feel that it’s a personal slur.”
It’s not the strength of anyone’s disagreement that makes them think it’s a personal slur. You could have said that 2+2=5, and no one, not even Anarch (who works on this stuff), would have taken that as a personal slur, no matter how strongly they disagreed.
What makes it a personal slur is that the opinion you expressed was about “a lot” of “the Left”. As I’m exempted, I don’t take it personally, but lots of other people might quite reasonably take it that they might be included. Since ‘not a lot’ is normally a minority, odds are that they are.
And when you say that they “should not be proud”, that is a personal insult, whether or not it’s equivalent to “they are evil bad people”. It may be a justified insult. (Which, I take it, is why people are wondering what the basis for it was.) But it is surely an insult.
That people take it that way isn’t due to the ‘strength of their disagreement’; it’s due to the ordinary meaning of the words.
We seem to have gone from being outraged to being outraged by the outrage and are now on the verge of being outraged by the outrage to the outrage. This is all getting a little too meta- for me, folks.
Gary, I appreciate that you’re trying to be helpful. I also reciprocate the respect and friendship you offer in your comment. However, I still don’t think you’re really reading what I wrote, and I can’t give the response that you think is appropriate.
This seems a silly (dare I say lawyerly?) distinction that I sincerely doubt would occur to anyone reading the sentence in question.
However it seems, there is a difference between not feeling proud about an event and feeling ashamed of it. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of Clinton’s actions during the L’affaire Lewinsky, for instance.
Would it be okay to say “There are not a lot on the right who are very intelligent”? By the literal meaning of the words, that’s perfectly true, isn’t it? After all, surely “very intelligent” must refer to a small subset, which is not a lot. How could anyone take offense?
Hilzoy, I respectfully suggest (again) that you’re missing the point. But let’s end it here.
However it seems, there is a difference between not feeling proud about an event and feeling ashamed of it. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of Clinton’s actions during the L’affaire Lewinsky, for instance.
Sure, von, but if you were commenting on it and said that Clinton shouldn’t feel proud of his actions, what do you think the implication would be?
Von, your post consisted of two points.
1. You feel sorry for Ben, because most of the left attacked him unfairly.
2. You look forward to Ben’s return.
That’s it.
The Poorman took your post and assumed you were serious. You yourself said that you didn’t want the occasion to pass without making these two points.
Presumably, the Poorman, Hilzoy, Gary and the rest of us are galled that you would choose to emphasize these two points for a man who deserves no such sympathy.
Let’s be clear: Ben himself has slandered the left far worse than the left has slandered Ben. Yet you choose to feel sorry for Ben.
Again, Ben has said that the left, minus Hilzoy, are uniformly harboring rapist fantasies. Yet, it is the left who you feel should not be proud and that Ben is deserving of sympathy.
That is galling.
von, Saying that you are neither proud nor ashamed of Clinton’s behavior is a non-sequitur. It’s YOUR behavior during l’affaire Lewinsky, or during some case, or whatever, that is germane.
When YOU take some action, and somebody suggests that you have no reason to be proud of that action, it is absolutely nonsensical to suggest that the ordinary reading of that suggestion is that you should feel nothing in particular.
This is the sort of thing that makes it possible for people — The Editors in this case — to make jokes about you without you even realizing what the joke is. If you want to drop it you are entitled, but be advised that several people on this thread, most of whom care about you far more than I do, think that this is an important thing for you to understand, and you are basically telling them to get lost.
p.s. for history. I see that I was unclear. I didn’t mean that von had asserted that it was demonstrably true that “not many…left…proud” I meant the “odious and baseless” part, on which his opinion that “not many…left…proud” was based. Opinions are inherently legitimate (though not necessarily noteworthy). But negative opinions offerred without basis are, as Gary points out, slurs. Whether intended or not.
“However, I still don’t think you’re really reading what I wrote, and I can’t give the response that you think is appropriate.”
few on the right have anything to be
Well, von, either in time you’ll reconsider what are reasonable interpretations that, as it happens, are pretty universally how everyone is understanding what you meant, or you can go with the idea that you are correct in best understanding the interpretation of what you said, and most everyone else is wrong, and darn them for it.
From there, I don’t know if you will decide that most all of the left is filled with people willfully determined to misunderstand your entirely reasonable statement that most of them having nothing to be proud of in their behavior re Ben Domenech, or what, but it’s all up to you.
All I can do is urge you to do, since you won’t reconsider immediately, is to back away, and consider this in the fullness of time later in the week, when you’ve had a bit more distance, and imagine how you might view it from the other side.
Imagine that I had said “there aren’t a lot on the right who should walk away from this Domenech defense feeling proud.”
Not the worst accusation in the world, certainly. But do you feel you said anything to be ashamed of? Do you think that most people on the right said anything to be ashamed of, to be not proud of, or acted in some way to be not proud of?
If someone at RedState complained about such a statement, would you post to tell them they were wrong?
Please consider this.
“Moreover, saying that one should not feel proud about something is not the same as saying that one is evil, or even that one should feel ashamed. It is saying that one should not feel proud.”
Ah, but von, you did suggest that the left should be ashamed. How else to take your first point: that you feel sorry for Ben, because the left has maligned him unfairly with “truly baseless — and truly odious — attacks”. Save for Hilzoy, of course.
Is it really your contention one shouldn’t feel ashamed for “truly baseless — and truly odious — attacks”?
This thread just flies too fast-
On evil twins: I liked the use of the twin Ferrante in Eco’s “Island of the Day Before” a book I enjoyed immensely but can be considered slow going.
There are plenty of wackos on the left, but there just is not a Hinderaker or a Malkin among them- the large part of the criticism of certain bloggers on the left is that they use rough language or are mean, the substantive criticism are much less applicable to them than they are to the bizarro universe that Hinderaker inhabits.
von, you made one of those nebulous “some people…” and these are viewed rightly as the langauge of slurring, because in our pathetic bloggo medium, that is how they are usually used. Context matters, just like Jeff Goldstein claiming he denounces plagiarism in no uncertain terms, but then proceeds to love love love the sinner. At what point does the love for the sinner really make it seem like there was no sin?
I think this post is the height of partisanship. You have taken what appears to be an extreme devil’s advocacy approach to the entire crime, the “plagiarism is bad, it goes without saying, therefore let me accept a terrible apology and move on to focus on the crimes of the other side.”
Seriously, the Red State guys sharpened their knives for Charles who played it as straight as could be imagined. Nothing whatsoever about their behavior is defensible, cloaked as it be in “friendship”.
There will always be a “somebody said something offensive in a comment at Eschaton” get out of jail free card for these guys- when do you stop accepting it as valid currency?
People, we have a failure to communicate here. I didn’t like the sentence in question when I read it, but von has said a number of times he didn’t intend a slur against the left, and I take him at his word. I think it’s well past time to move on.
Von, when one person seems to be misunderstanding what you wrote, it may be a problem with that one person’s reading comprehension. When everyone who has a comment has understood what you wrote to mean A, it does no good to say “but I meant B!” – you need to rewrite what you wrote so that you are clearly saying B, not A. Or, as this is a blogpost, you need to insert an update explaining you meant B, nor A.
I think this would have been enormously in our interests.
A lot depends on who the “our” is in that sentence. Hilzoy, your comment puts you firmly on the liberal side of the liberal/left divide, which is where I’m sure you want to be. But there are some good reasons why history didn’t happen that way, and they have at least as much to do with who owns and rules in this country as with modes of argument.
clarifying, I’m quoting from and responding to Hilzoy’s comment at March 25 5:30 PM. And my point is completely tangential to the thread, so I’m fine with it being completely ignored, including by Hilzoy.
I don’t particularly feel sorry for Ben except in a very general bad things are bad for people even when they sow the seeds of their own destruction kind of way.
1. He was a constant participant in the ugly LGF/WashingtonMonthly Comments/DemocraticUnderground internet pseudo-discourse.
2. He was hired on the WaPo blog for that and perhaps ‘connections’ (the latter part being rather unsurprising in the world of politics and/or journalism).
3. He was immediately and unfairly attacked for racism.
4. He was immediately and unfairly attacked for homophobia.
5. He was soon after correctly attacked for plagiarism.
6. His initial reaction to the charge in #5 was ridiculous and stupid.
7. His current apology is barely serviceable.
There is a lot not to like in that story. Starting with the very prevalance of his style of ‘debate’ all over the internet as mentioned in point 1. But it certainly is true that there was an appearance of “let’s sling mud and hope some sticks”. The fact that some justifiably stuck doesn’t transform that attitude into something laudable The fact that hilzoy was not such a person does not mean that such people did not exist, nor does it mean that there weren’t a fairly large number of them.
All that said, I agree with Gary’s statement “there aren’t a lot on the right who should walk away from this Domenech defense feeling proud” even though he meant it as an example of something that isn’t correct. There aren’t a lot on the right who should walk away from this Demenech defense feeling proud. I don’t, and I didn’t defend him at all. The knee-jerk defense that many exhibited without getting the facts was not a good thing, and the fact that it was done by people somewhat on ‘my side’ makes me cringe.
Save for [Von] there aren’t a lot on the [right] who should walk away from this one feeling proud.
possible values for “this one”:
the impeachment of Pres. Clinton,
the Belleisles affair,
John Lott’s continuing employment at AEI,
Rush Limbaugh’s treatment of Hilary Clinton,
Rush Limbaugh’s continuing employment following drug abuse problems,
the Swift Boat affair.
do you see yet, Von, that, by including people WHO TOOK NO ACTION on the scandal in your condemnation, you have insulted them?
Both sides have long since played the politics of personal destruction. If you want the monolithic “left” to stop, then you go first.
And that means that people who engage in the politics of personal destruction, like Ben D., are NOT welcome back.
1. He was a constant participant in the ugly LGF/WashingtonMonthly Comments/DemocraticUnderground internet pseudo-discourse.
Think you’re missing the most important site in the pseudo-discourse there, Sebastian: RedState. It’s not exempt just because he founded it.
And as an aside, I wasn’t aware that DU was referred to outside conservative circles. I’ve certainly never seen it linked by any liberal, progressive or even left-wing blogger; in fact, if it weren’t for the relentless drumming by conservatives, I’d never have heard of it, period.* LGF, by contrast, was for many a year not just linked, but linked approvingly, by its conservative brethren — and I’m fairly sure it still is.
* That includes a fairly close read of the Calpundit/WashMo threads, fyi, which reminds me: I know you’ve been unfairly slammed in there from time to time, but to equate them with LGF or DU is just silly. They’re not even vaguely comparable.
‘scuse me: the most relevant site (to the present conversation), not most important site overall.
And that means that people who engage in the politics of personal destruction, like Ben D., are NOT welcome back.
They should never have been welcomed in the first place, especially by the Washington Post.
But sadly this is the state of things in 2006. Until journalism and the major media outlets refuse to play patty-cake with the propagandists and script-reciters (e.g., the Karl Roves, Ken Mehlmans and Brit Humes of the world) we aren’t going to get anywere.
The thing I find most puzzling about all of this is the that people are shocked, shocked i tell you about the attacks on him and his character. This IS politics people, character attacks, and for that matter attacks of all sorts are common and generally seen as fair game by both sides. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous. It seems no one on the right or even leaning right can write about this without throwing something in about these attacks on him, as if they are an entirely new and surprising development in the sphere of politics. They aren’t it’s business as usual, since the revolution, and our founding fathers even engaged in it against eachother. Spare me the outrage.
Sebastian: WYMM?
A newcomer’s perspective…
At this point I’d be inclined to say of any left/right dispute that “the usual suspects behaved disgracefully.” Because I’m sure I can find commenters at Washington Monthly, dailyKos, Eschaton, and the like spewing forth the most amazing vile crap, and at least one or a few Kos diarists, someone at Firedoglake in an intemperate moment, or someone like that making a main blog post that’s also vile. Likewise when it comes to the right–posters and commenters at Red State, Little Green Footballs, and the like spewing forth the matching crap. (Is there a multi-dimensional crap symmetry? New frontiers of physics.)
But the thing is, that doesn’t have anything to do with the topic at hand. Because they’ll get that way about anything, including the absence of developments in a story, Pultizer and Oscar nominees, you name it. There are people who’ve rotted their souls into ravening pit bulls, and any actual information or worthwhile commentary they may have will be kind of accidental.
The question for any issue is what the people who aren’t automatically in attack mode say. Von, I think this is what some of the liberal commenters are trying to say here. Lumping all flavors of the left together makes as much logical sense as looking for right-wing responses to an issue from Pat Buchanan, Lyndon Larouche, and someone from the Libertarian Party, and using that as the basis for a statement of “a lot of the right”–it wouldnt’ be fair to you, or Charles Bird, or John Cole, or anyone else who’s trying to look at the issue and deal with it as it is, rather than merely as a launching platform for the stock noise.
It seems to me that any assessment of what “the left” or “the right” are saying about an issue has to begin by factoring out the people who always say the same things. The rest of us can’t control them and shouldn’t be held liable for them.
For someone who “isn’t a racist,” Domenech has sure said some racist things.
I’m not talking about his CSK=Commie comment; that was merely vile and stupid.
I’m referring to a rather long post of his which said black people commit most of the crimes in this country, said anti-poverty programs which helped black people were a drag on the country, and expressed approval for the idea that aborting black babies would improve matters.
How is that not racist?
Regarding the charges of homophobia – well, I hadn’t heard about those, and I’m sure not going to dive into Domenech’s oeuvre to look for homophobic essays, so I can’t say anything about them.
CaseyL, do you mean this diary? He’s quoting that stuff. Whether approvingly or not, your guess is as good as mine.
Whether approvingly or not, your guess is as good as mine.
Ah, ambiguity. Most times unintentional.
Sometimes not.
Sebastian:
while i largely agree with what you wrote, i think that firedoglake or another demcratic partisan might modify your list a little:
(a) referencing the dispute over Froomkin which may have lead to his hiring in the first place;
(b) getting legitimately attacked for being a biblical literalist — while he’s entitled to his own beliefs, does the WaPo really need to give a soapbox to someone who doesn’t [believe/understand] evolution, especially given the Republican War on Science;
(c) racism — with the Corretta as a communist comment, he is, at best, incredibly ignorant of the civil rights movement. at worst he is a racist and there was other evidence to support that charge.
(d) his first few points contained scorching diatribes against the left. given the Post’s history with FDL and BD’s own launch, the fact that there was an immediate backlash is something he and the Post brought on themselves.
i have no idea what kind of blogstorm the Post’s hiring of Dan Drezner or Eugene Volokh would draw. If they drew the same kind of backlash as BD drew, i might have to reconsider my position.
and while i recognize that my own partisanship is coloring my view of this case, i find it awfully difficult to cast much blame on the liberal blogs. BD’s style of partisanship was bound to generate that kind of response.
Domenech addresses that quote in his last Red America post, ending with a classy “people who misunderstand need to learn to read” comment:
For a respected intellectual, Neuhaus certainly doesn’t do a very good job of communicating his point, and Domenech’s posting the quote without comment was also not the best example of clarity in communication. Still, I’m not willing to call him a racist for it.
“And as an aside, I wasn’t aware that DU was referred to outside conservative circles. I’ve certainly never seen it linked by any liberal, progressive or even left-wing blogger; in fact, if it weren’t for the relentless drumming by conservatives, I’d never have heard of it, period.*”
To this day, I still don’t know what it is, where it is, who is in it, who founded it, what its purpose is, or anything about it. And “yes,” to all of the above.
I’m not saying it’s a mythical enitity, but so far as I’m directly concerned, it is. I imagine I could find it if I googled, but why I’d want to, I have no idea.
In contrast, I’ve seen a bunch of links to FreeRepublic over the years, and visited a smattering. And I’ve heard of lucianne.com, but never visited, and not seen it much linked on rightwing blogs, either.
I have on a couple of occasions followed a link (from a rightwing site, gasping in horror, usually, but also on a handful of occasions from some extreme left blogs) to some “IndyMedia” site/post, so I at least have a vague grasp of what they are and how they work, but they’re on a vaguely similar level of beyond-the-fringe kookdom, in my world and worldview.
“Democratic Underground”? Beats me. Never yet in my life seen a link to it, whatever it is, or a quote from it, or a reference to it other than that it’s Evil.
I guess I don’t get around enough.
Can’t say I’m impressed with the quality of posts, in general, at Washington Monthly, though my sampling of that is very low, indeed, and it didn’t seem at all comparably bad to the horrorshow that is LGF, but I’ve not sampled or looked at LGF since somewhere in mid-2005, either. Just for the record. (And you should know by now what I think of unmoderated mass comment sites.)
Gary: too lazy to Google, but it’s Democratic Underground. Back when I first discovered blogs, it was one of the first I discovered (along with kos), and since, at the time, my self-appointed mission was to answer factual questions about Wes Clark, and provide factual responses to errors, and since DU contained lots of errors, I hung out there for a month or two. At least at the time, it was silly — a lot of people who seemed, to me, much more likely to be high school students than your average ObWi commenter, or even your average Atrios commenter — but generally not actively malevolent. Conspiracy theories were sometimes indulged, and people made the sorts of insults they might make towards their high school classmates via email, but it wasn’t the sort of downright scary “let’s string those traitors up and let them hang by their toenails” atmosphere of LGF. (It did have sort of the same ‘geez, do you guys ever venture outside your ideological bubble?’ feel, but the bubble seemed to me less malign.
Though, as I said, it was often silly. — At the time, the most vitriol was directed by Deaniacs against supporters of any other candidate. (Note: this is just DU Deaniacs, not Deaniacs generally.)
Still, I’m not willing to call him a racist for it.
Love him, hate him….love him and hate him…Steve Gilliard weighs in on this here*.
*With a special guest appearance by Josh Trevino in comments
CaseyL, with all due respect, your 4:19 is totally inadequate, and does make Domenech’s detractors look bad. If you’d looked at the post you’d see that it was not his post at all. It was merely quoted verbatim and without comment (though with attribution, it should be noted). Furthermore the quote itself expresses a very strong disapproval for the abortion of black babies, despite the presumption that it would have a beneficial social effect. Neuhaus cares so much for the unborn child that even future criminals qualify! Neuhaus’ primary argument (though you have to read very carefully to get it, as the quoted text itself is rather incoherent) is to accuse black leaders of practicing eugenics on their followers.
No, I’m not joking, though I am being deliberately inflammatory, and I am definitely being unfair to Neuhaus, who probably had no idea that he was misreading Leavitt, or that Leavitt’s analysis was itself poorly constructed.
That said, alleging that Domenech is a racist is pretty much fishing in a barrel. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you’re hungry but lazy) Gilly has already yanked out all the big’uns, gutted ’em, cleaned ’em, and fried ’em up for ya. (I coulda sworn somebody already linked to that in this thread but now I can’t find it) Parsley and lemon available…
Oops. Previewing before posting does no good if you don’t read down to the bottom, huh? Sorry…
I think Gilliard’s point about the segregationist billboard is pretty weak. Domenech’s motivations for calling CSK a communist aren’t quite as clear as were the motivations of the folks behind that billboard. I understand why this sort of thing would raise suspicions of racism (particularly when added to the growing heap of circumstantial evedence) but it’s hardly conclusive, and doesn’t account for the possibility that he was just uncritically regurgitating a pre-existing right-wing slur.
The only thing that is crystal clear to me is that the comment was very, very stupid.
“evidence”
Blech.
All that said, I agree with Gary’s statement “there aren’t a lot on the right who should walk away from this Domenech defense feeling proud” even though he meant it as an example of something that isn’t correct. There aren’t a lot on the right who should walk away from this Demenech defense feeling proud. I don’t, and I didn’t defend him at all. The knee-jerk defense that many exhibited without getting the facts was not a good thing, and the fact that it was done by people somewhat on ‘my side’ makes me cringe.
I would agree with that comment as well.
Can’t say I’m impressed with the quality of posts, in general, at Washington Monthly, though my sampling of that is very low, indeed, and it didn’t seem at all comparably bad to the horrorshow that is LGF, but I’ve not sampled or looked at LGF since somewhere in mid-2005, either.
The posts are fine; agree or disagree with Kevin (and I do both on a regular basis), his only extremism is in his moderation. That, and his unforgivable support of the University of Spoiled Children. (:
The comment threads… well, they were always a bit bruising, but an entirely new era dawned when Kevin went sleuthing through Bush’s Vietnam records. Flamers holding every conceivable position descended in a horde and the discourse went to hell in a handbasket, never really to recover. I and a number of other regulars actually sent Kevin emails begging him to start moderating his comments — there was one particularly vile troll with the alarming talent of bringing out the vileness in others that was particularly derailing any attempt at conversation — but he never did, for reasons as-yet-unspecified.
That said, the discourse there has limped its way back to substandard — with a number of individual commenters being quite cogent and interesting, I hasten to add — so it’s not in any way comparable to the other sites in question.
“Can’t say I’m impressed with the quality of posts, in general, at Washington Monthly,”
Sorry, that should have been “comments”; the posts are fine, and generally very good, if sometimes rather obvious; but often not obvious.
I probably agree with Kevin some 85% of the time or so, though I’d hesitate to put a real number to it; but generally we’re of like mind on most topics; it’s actually one of the poli-blogs I read most frequently, though frankly mostly I try to get most of my news unfiltered, by reading lots and lots of newspapers and magazines myself, rather than mostly blogs.
But bloggers I tend to agree with a lot tend to include Kevin, Matt Yglesias, to some degree Brad deLong, to some degree Brad Plumer, Ted Barlow, Tim Burke, Mark Kleiman, a smattering of others; some “Hilzoy” character. Glenn Greenwald has been giving some good commentary since his recent rise, though pretty much just on a couple of issues (but Brad deLong also is a on the limited focus side, though he also goes eclectic at times, more so than Glenn has).
I don’t much care for the firebreathing blogs, though some do some good investigative work; as I keep saying, I don’t find that adjectives and anger lend much value, more than not, though they have their place in limited doses. But generally speaking, the blogs that like to use a lot of adjectives turn me off; I think very poorly of Bush; I don’t need a lot of shouting and cursing to think that. (Thus, no enthusiasm from me about Firedoglake.)
I’m very fond of Jim Henley, by the way, even though we disagree on various perspectives, but agree on others; I like John Cole, even though I think it’s a shame his formative political experience was being a kid during the Reagan era and thinking everything was great, and I have to admit that Tim F. has helped out Balloon Juice, despite my dislike of bloggers diluting their voice by adding others to previously personal sites.
Gromit, commie civil-rights activists is one of those dog-whistle code-word secret-handshake things. Remember how liberal bloggers, on account of not knowing the secret anti-abortion handshakes, were mystified when W mentioned Dred Scott in his inaugural speech?
I think commie is a little out of date actually — more evidence that squaresville parents are to blame. “Grandstanding” civil-rights activists would probably be the most common usage nowadays, but womanizing, money-grubbing, or self-genocidal civil-rights activists would all get the point across too. Billmon, who like Digby has seen the inside of the underbelly, elaborates on the commie issue halfway down this post. Look for “Anyone who’s spent any time among the Freepers…”
BTW, wow. I haven’t looked at Gilliard’s comments in a long time. There’s some pretty ugly stuff being said there too. Alas…
Radish, I understand, but if it wasn’t ambiguous, it wouldn’t work as a code word. Had Domenech actually been around during the civil-rights era, I might bring a different set of assumptions to this question, but he came of age after the overt racism of the Dixiecrats-turned-Southern-Republicans was driven underground, and if he’s like the other fire-breathing young conservatives I know, he was raised on a steady diet of straight-up anti-communism without the segregationist overtones.
I’m not ruling out the possibility that he was conscious of the implications of what he was saying, but it is also quite possible that he grew up more or less in an ideological bubble (he certainly liked to hang out in one over at Red State), and had been shielded from the history behind the slur. So I need more conclusive evidence than this if I’m going to brand him a racist.
radish, you’re right: it’s a quote-post, without commentary (and without paragraph breaks, for some reason), which makes me wonder what the point of posting it was. However, I won’t mind-read. Like I said, I have no particular desire to wade through Domenech’s work.
…and if he’s like the other fire-breathing young conservatives I know, he was raised on a steady diet of straight-up anti-communism without the segregationist overtones.
I’d like to preemptively note that when I wrote this I didn’t mean to suggest that Reagan-era conservatism is without its own racial baggage, just that “communist” as a segregationist code word was, I think, peculiar to the Civil Rights era.
“…were mystified when W mentioned Dred Scott in his inaugural speech?”
Debate, actually; that’s campaign stuff, not inaugural stuff.
“I think commie is a little out of date actually — more evidence that squaresville parents are to blame.”
If he’d said something to the effect that Martin King (and by extension Coretta Scott) had communist associates, he’d have been okay, if pushing guilt-by-association; but that wouldn’t have been remotely red meat enough, so he simply lied. And then claimed exuberance, or somesuch, when called on it when the spotlight was on (want to bet he’d never have taken it back if it was not for the WaPo job?).
“So I need more conclusive evidence than this if I’m going to brand him a racist.”
To be clear, and to use a word popular in some circles: ditto. I’m not exonerating him, but neither would I make the accusation without conclusive evidence, rather than interpretation and indications and penumbras or associations.
Apropos of nothing, West Wing just had dialogue with Santos (Jimmy Smits, it’s five days before the election) on how “Atrios is flying in; you have an interview on Eschaton.” “You know, I speak 3 languages.” “It’s a blog.”
Oh, and I left out a line about “I’m talking to a guy named ‘Atrios'”?
And now he just finished the chat and said, apparently of Atrios “Not much of a people person.”
I doubt Ben was speaking in code or constructing deliberate lies.
The King communist thing was more like thoughtless parroting of something he heard, or slightly more thoughtful assuming something without researching it. It is more in tune with the lack of scholarship implied by plagiarism
Gromit, hmmm, definitely plausible (as is Jay S’s explanation — see I did read all the way down during preview this time!). Fair enough. The “commie civil rights leaders” trope has never struck me as particularly ambiguous, but then I don’t actually know any College Republican types. I’m glad you’re giving Domenech the benefit of doubt, but with all the other indicators about Domenech, the most generous I can be about all this is to give Neuhaus the benefit of the doubt and think of the original author as “clueless” rather than “bigoted.”
CaseyL I wonder what the point was as well. My working hypothesis is that when you’re up against ruthless baby-killers who are otherwise indistinguishable from normal people you have to keep reminding yourself of the distinction. (The part of that link I’m referring to is the baby-killer part, but Rx you read the whole thing if you haven’t already).
Gary, oops, thank you. Shoulda used them internets thingies… I commend you and Gromit both for your sense of justice. Me, not so much…
I’m fairly sure that Neuhaus was trying to be satirical. A very, very mean-spirited mocking streak runs through that kind of highly intellectualized, very conservative Christian theorizing. They look at Swift and Chesterton and others, and lose sight of the charity involved.
Ooo, Passer-by, you might want to check out the Scalia thread ;^)
Gary, I missed “West Wing”, but Eschaton seems like a rather unlikely place to find an interview with a presidential candidate. Like Instapundit, it’s not big on actual content. So it seems it was like the appearance by “Lawrence Lessig” (played by Christopher Lloyd) on the show a while back, where they used the name and a few characteristics of a real person to produce a character that clearly wasn’t that person. I don’t understand the point, and they’d obviously never do that with a television pundit or newspaper columnist.
“Gary, I missed “West Wing”, but Eschaton seems like a rather unlikely place to find an interview with a presidential candidate.”
West Wing not infrequently gets technical details wrong. They’re good at atmosphere (and condensing things down to 8 or so characters, of course, in an immensely unbelievable way; flaws of television), but not to be taken as having a documentary-level degree of accuracy, as you note.
They had a couple of other mentions of Atrios, but I figured I’d stop documenting. Yeah, it’s just a way of sounding hip and with it and up to date, and besides, it’s an alternate universe, anyway. In their universe, where American troops are in Gaza, and the Presidential election is this year, etc., Atrios does interviews with the Democratic Presidential candidate 5 days before the election.
“I don’t understand the point,”
The point is a bit of homage, and to amuse those in the know. Don’t see anything wrong with it, myself.
“…and they’d obviously never do that with a television pundit or newspaper columnist.”
They had an obvious Maureen Dowd clone referred to, in the whole schtick about Donna’s, well, anyway. But referring to a well-known mainstream media figure by name wouldn’t serve the same purpose of tipping the hat to someone only cognescenti would recognize.
As for Lessig, he thought it was a hoot, and as it happens, he was involved in the drawing up of a post-Soviet constitution, and has years of expertise on the subject (maybe you’re not aware of this?); see here. This seems (you give me the impression; I may be misunderstanding) to bother you for some reason, but I’m not clear why.
I rather doubt, incidentally, that Duncan Black would turn down an opportunity to have the Democratic Presidential candidate chat live online five days before the election, though who knows, maybe I’m wrong.
It doesn’t bother me. I just found it strange. I did know that Lessig enjoyed it.
I agree that Atrios wouldn’t turn down the opportunity, but I seriously doubt it’s an opportunity that would be offered. Kos would be equally unthinkable politically but at least has had candidate interviews (and candidate diaries) on his site. But as you say, it’s a rather different universe, as you can see by looking at the Republican presidential candidate if nothing else.
But enough of this off-topic babbling. The page is already unmanageably long.
“But as you say, it’s a rather different universe, as you can see by looking at the Republican presidential candidate if nothing else.”
Would that we could have Arnold Vinick as the real Republican leader. (I’ve seen spoilers indicate that Santos will win, which is what I’ve taken the plan to be all along, but, of course, since they won’t be continuing the show, they can do absolutely anything they want, now. Maybe Martians will land; who knows?; I’m wondering who the new Democratic Veep candidate is going to be; I’m also still rather sad the show won’t continue, though perhaps it’s time.)
Von, if you’ve got time to read the comments/comment in response, you surely have time to update and apologize.
Well done, Von.
CMatt, huh?
Jes, well past tedious.
Just expressing my disapproval to Von for posting “Onward” here. It wasn’t written to convince ObWi readers of anything, IMO, particularly given the defense of it, or lack thereof. Being lambasted by Charles is far preferable to watching Von’s paper training. Not trying to revive the thread, just wanted to note this to him.
Rilkefan: Jes, well past tedious.
Likewise.
Von, if you’ve got time to read the comments/comment in response, you surely have time to update and apologize.
I’ve covered that subject, Jes.
I’ve covered that subject, Jes.
Yes, that you shouldn’t have to apologize for insulting “the Left” in a wild generalisation because really you meant the people writing and commenting on a handful of specific posts. But as you haven’t bothered* to update your post to say so, your explanation about exactly who you were insulting is buried down in this thread, leaving your generalized insult to “the Left” on public view.
*”Haven’t bothered” is a little unkind: I recognize that you have good reason to be busy right now, and that updating a blog is fairly low on your list of priorities. But, assuming that you’re not just another RedStater Republican who believes that if you have to criticize, even mildly, another Republican, you must preface your criticism with gross abuse of “the Left”, updating this blog post ought to be on your list of priorities somewhere. Albeit, I admit, well below new-baby priorities, partner priorities, and job priorities. Still. I never thought you were just another RedStater Republican, and I’ll be delighted when you do the update and apology that shows you’re not.
Jes- I agree with you that von has shown a surprising lack of class here, but I feel like you are decending into extortion with that last sentence. Even if that weren’t beneath you, which I think it is, its clearly pointless by this stage of the conversation.
I think you might just be right about this clause: “Republican who believes that if you have to criticize, even mildly, another Republican, you must preface your criticism with gross abuse of “the Left”‘ After all von did violate the 11th commandment, maybe the sweeping critisism of the left is the required pennance.
Frank: but I feel like you are decending into extortion with that last sentence. Even if that weren’t beneath you, which I think it is, its clearly pointless by this stage of the conversation.
Ah, actually, you’re right. Oh well.
After all von did violate the 11th commandment, maybe the sweeping critisism of the left is the required pennance.
I’m not sure it was even a penance… 😉 I think by now the 11th Commandment is reflex.
But here is the thing: Von did not violate the 11th commandment with the original post. He made exactly two points:
1. He feels sorry for Ben.
2. He can’t wait to see Ben return.
He didn’t criticize at all in the original post.
By RedState standards, manyoso, Von did criticise Domenech: he said “I won’t minimize his errors” and “the final charge stuck (and properly so)”. When violating the 11th Commandment, however justly, it seems to be reflex to include a scattershot and much harsher attack on the opposition – as if by making the whole post an attack on the opposition, you can shield your own mild criticism of your own side from being “misused”.
I think someone upthread got it right: this was a post more intended to maintain Von’s Republican credentials than anything else.