Well, apparently no good deed goes unpunished, so my reward for defending the Washington Post for hiring Ben Domenech is this morning’s reports that he might be a recidivist plagiarist. We should certainly wait and give Domenech more time to explain himself, but he’s got to do better than this:

Late yesterday, the liberal Web sites Daily Kos and Atrios posted examples of what appeared to be instances of plagiarism from Domenech’s writing at the William & Mary student paper. Three sentences of a 1999 Domenech review of a Martin Scorsese film were identical to a review in Salon magazine, and several sentences in Domenech’s piece on a James Bond movie closely resembled one in the Internet Movie Database. Domenech said he needed to research the examples but that he never used material without attribution and had complained about a college editor improperly adding language to some of his articles.

Sorry — it’s not just the college paper. There are other examples, including one from NRO. This is bad. Perhaps it is not fatal, but we need explanations not just from Domenech, but also from the Washington Post on how it plans to handle this.

That said, there are two quick points I’d like to make. First, the allegations of racism against Domenech are a case study in the kind of mendacious, oppressive speech policing that has made discussion of race in this country paranoid and banal. The attacks on Domenech’s family were an affront to reasoned debate. It seemed that when it came to Ben Domenech, <a href=http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/03/22/lets-make-a-movie/-1514>no personal insult was out-of-bounds. These people who meant to shame the Washington Post have no shame themselves.

Second, regardless of whether the plagiarism charges make it impossible for Domenech to continue as the WaPo’s “Red America” blogger, the WaPo would be foolish and craven to bow to this mob — for whom attacking the blogger was just a means to an end — by abandoning the project altogether.

Adding a conservative blog was a smart editorial decision to widen the variety of viewpoints on offer at Washingtonpost.com — not a “sop to the right.” But jettisoning that blog, and thereby limiting the viewpoints on offer, would indisputably be a sop to the left.