Plagiarism (and Competence) Matters

A terrific post by hilzoy, explaining why serial plagiarism is far from a trivial issue–make sure to read the comments too. And as Greg Saunders points out, there’s something particularly remarkable about somebody plagiarizing film reviews. As is often the case, the sheer laziness is some ways more damning than the utter lack of ethics.

What’s also remarkable about this Red State apologia–whose attempts to defend cases of plagiarism that couldn’t be more clear-cut with a bunch of nonsense about “permissions” did indeed make the post pure comedy gold even before Tacitus showed up–is its attempts to claim that every blogger should want any blogger to succeed. But why? This hire couldn’t have less merit, and it’s not just that he’s a lazy serial plagiarist. He’s an awful writer who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Take his famous argument that some judges are worse than the Klan. Even ignoring its offensiveness, it’s a remarkably clueless and illogical argument. Just to compound the silliness, let’s bring in Confederate Yankee, who attempts to defend this argument:

Domenech says that the worst judges, with the authority of the state behind them, are more dangerous than is a specific marginalized extremist group. Does anyone dare to argue the absolute truth of that statement?

Domenech then makes an allusion to the millions of children (of all races) aborted since Roe v. Wade was decided. No one can argue the fact that many more lives have been cut short by abortions than by lynchings.

Domenech is 100% factually correct.

For a second, let’s leave aside the quite remarkable claim that state action keeping in accordance with the rule of law is worse than stateless terrorism. Let’s explore the implications Domenech and CY’s contention that abortion is morally comparable to lynching, so the only relevant question is numbers. If this is true, it should be noted that the “worst judges” defense is irrelevant, because every judge in the federal courts is responsible for millions of “lynchings.” As you can see in his Casey dissent, Antonin Scalia himself “dismisses the value of all unborn lives”:

The States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so. The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.

To state the obvious, if abortion is the equivalent of lynching, then Scalia is, in fact, worse than the Klan. He does not hold unborn lives to have inherent Constitutional value; he simply holds that the state may protect their lives, like they protect the lives of, say cats. Even if Roe v. Wade were overturned, there would be hundreds of thousands of acts morally equivalent to lynchings a year by their perverse logic. Domenech (and his lickspittle) are, of course, repeating the classic sub-freeper error of assuming that conservative judges believe the fetus to be a person, and liberal judges do not. But, of course, no judge does–whatever its status as an ethical position, as a legal position the idea that fetuses are “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment is a beyond-crackpot position, about as viable as claiming that the 3rd Amendment requires single-payer healthcare. And, of course, it is therefore accurate to note that his analogy of he nation’s judges to the Klan is spectacularly offensive lunacy.

And that’s the problem with Domenech, and (more importantly) the fact that one of the nation’s most important newspapers hired him–he’s dumber than a bag of wet rocks. He’s a lazy, fifteenth-rate hack who traffics almost entirely in stale wingnut cliches and lacks an even rudimentary understanding of the basic issues he opines on. This hire was an utter embarrassment to the WaPo even before the plagiarism charges emerged, and it’s now far, far worse than that. And, as I said previously, I think it’s more offensive to conservatives than anyone else. It’s tokenism in its purest form–“we’ll hire somebody who knows nothing much about anything, isn’t very bright, is much more a political operative than journalist, can barely string 5 sentences together and is so lazy he has to plagiarize goddamned Counting Crows album reviews. And conservatives be happy, because we’re throwing them a bone! Yeah, there’s no meat on it, but they’ll eat anything!” It would be genuinely pathetic if they were right, and any “conservative” who goes down with this ship is someone really not worth paying the slightest mind in the future.

…also see Doughouse Riley on why his youthful red-baiting (in early 2006, those were the good old days!) of Coretta Scott King matters.

…a comprehensive list of his plagiarism from DKos. What’s amazing is the not only may have plagairized a top-1o-albums list–a top-ten albums list!–for the National Review, he didn’t even cut out the Creed one. (Or, even worse, may have picked it himself!) Obviously, this is by far his worst crime yet…