RIP Ben, Patron Saint of Truth, Martyr on the Altar of Editors, Killed by Vicious Liberal Lions

Blogenfreude’s head is going to explode if he doesn’t get some snark about Ben Domenech’s swan song at RedState, and I am nothing if not accommodating of the near-exploding.

The hate mail that I have received since the launch of this blog has been overwhelmingly profane and violent. My family has been threatened; my friends have been deluged; my phone has been prank called. The most recent email that showed up while writing this post talked about how the author would like to hack off my head, and wishes my mother had aborted me.

Dude, join the fucking club. In fact, try being a feminist progressive blogger for awhile (who, by the way, doesn’t even have a slot in a national newspaper) and see if there aren’t wackos who send you all kinds of crazy shit. Comes with the territory, Big Boy. Deal.

In fact, you might try having a good laugh about it. That is, if you can manage to find your sense of humor buried under all that self-pity. It’s probably somewhere near your social conscious, unless that’s already been totally obliterated by the crushing weight of your feelings of entitlement.

While I am not a journalist, I have, myself, written more than one thing that has been plagiarized in the past. But these charges have also served to create an atmosphere where no matter what is said on my Red America blog, leftists will focus on things with my byline from when I was a teenager.

Oh, somebody call the waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhmbulance! The horror that mean old horrible “leftists” actually dug out things you published in college. It’s not exactly like they raided the defunct MySpace page of a then-14-year-old. “He said Star Wars ‘is a wild ride,’ and everyone knows Peter Travers said that in the 70s!” Please.

But while the folks at washingtonpost.com understand my position and are convinced by my arguments on many of these issues, they also feel that the firestorm here will only serve to damage us all, and that there is no way this blog can continue without being permanently tagged to this firestorm. Therefore, I have resigned this position with washingtonpost.com.

Yeah, well, shit stinks, and the smell tends to linger.

To my friends: thank you for your support.

And I promise to buy you guys some wetnaps to clean up that egg all over your faces.

To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.

Aww. You’re welcome, dear.

The majority of the piece is understandably dedicated, however, to the charges of plagiarism.

I can rebut several of the alleged incidents here.

Which he goes on to do, asserting that it was everyone’s fault but his. Once again, a fine example of a devotee of The Ownership Society who accepts no ownership whatsoever for anything. And, you know what? Any of the incidents he addresses, taken alone, might seem reasonable, but when someone seems to have plagiarized multiple articles in multiple places, that seems to form what we like to call “a pattern.” He whines that everything happened so long ago that he has no notes to prove his case, so it’s his word against the Big Bad Liberals. Well, buddy—one time, and I might have had some sympathy, but when there’s smoke coming from every place at which your quill has ever been in service, I start to suspect you might not just be a plagiarist, but an arsonist, too.

I’m reminded of the scene in Shattered Glass when Glass’ editor starts questioning him about this story, and that story, and this story, and that story, and the stories that need explaining just pile up so high that they obscure any possibility of a reasonable expectation. I once wrote, “We used to have a healthy mistrust of our government; we assumed that the flaws of humankind weren’t checked at the doorways of the White House and the Pentagon. When the shit hit the fan, we assumed that the people involved might do less than ethical things in the pursuit of self-preservation. Now to suggest such a thing is to be deemed a paranoiac. It is as though we have been asked, and, inexplicably, collectively agreed, to rid ourselves of common sense and our very understanding of human nature.” DittoBoy seems to be relying on the same principle: Give me the benefit of the doubt against all logic and reason. No.

Buh-bye, Benny.