Domenech Must Go (UPDATE: He Has Resigned)

UPDATE: WaPo says Domenech has resigned. This is the proper center-right response to problems of this nature, and stakes out a distinct contrast with the example cited below, liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and many others. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, in a new post, says this is not the time to defend the indefensible. She’s right (thanks to the commenter below for the catch that Hilzoy is female). That’s what the other side does too often.

UPDATE 2: Domenech defends. Some valid points, but they don’t carry the day. The better question is, as Large Bill notes in the comments below, how did The Post let someone into such a sensitive position without adequate investigation. I would argue, at the risk of ticking off some younger readers, that the lofty and automatically controversial perch of conservative blogger at WaPo should not go to any 24 year-old (for contrast, think of Barone or John Leo at US News). UPDATE 2A: The he apologizes.
_________________________

Michelle Malkin covers the topic that’s all over the blogosphere this morning: Ben Domenech’s “alleged” plagiarism (the word “alleged” looks like it should be in the tiniest of quote marks).

Unlike leftists, who all too often let their plagiarizers off the hook after non-career-ending sanctions and allow them to keep working (thereby hurting the left’s credibility indefinitely — think Mike Barnicle — “Notwithstanding these controversies, and perhaps because of his family’s social standing in the Boston business community and Washington political circles, he did not become a ‘journalistic pariah’ in the fashion of Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair”), conservatives and the honor-bound should not, and Ben of all people should know that if he faces things honestly.

Domenech needs to pull the plug on his Red America blog at The Washington Post — NOW. He’s already done considerable damage, and the bleeding must stop. If he won’t go, the Post should send him packing.

For what little it’s worth, Red America is no longer on my blogroll.

(The original post on Red America’s debut is here.)
____________________________

UPDATE: Obsidian Wings articulates the case after providing numerous examples, and question Domenech’s judgment in taking the assignment (as do I):

First, plagiarism is very serious. I don’t know how much this view is shared by people who don’t write for a living, but for writers, it’s pretty much the ultimate dishonor. Your reputation as a writer or a scholar depends on your written work, and the discovery that you have been passing someone else’s work off as your own is the closest thing we have to a mortal sin.

Second, in my opinion, the Post should not have hired him, not because he’s conservative, but because he has no journalistic experience, and besides, his first few blog posts were pretty dreadful. But if these charges pan out and they don’t fire him, they have no standards at all. Likewise, if they pan out, you have to ask yourself why the Post didn’t do a better job of vetting him before they hired him.

Third, what could he have been thinking when he took the Post job? If anything on earth is predictable, it’s that if the Post hired a lightning rod like Domenech, his work would be gone over with a fine toothed comb. Could he possibly not have anticipated this? If he did, why didn’t he just come up with a decent excuse to say no?