Thanks for your post on that other thread.
Captain's Quarters is saying a movie review this conservative blogger plagiarized when he was 19 (not 17, like the other examples), is too much to ignore. And, I think it appeared in the National Review Online or somewhere like that.
The blogger claims he wrote this movie review before the other writer's review, but data bases state otherwise, according to the conservative blogger's accusers.
So, who knows. Or, who knew? It seems one strange movie review at 19 years old can ruin one's career at the Washington Post at age 24. I guess that's the brave new world we live in on the information superhighway.
From the conservative blog, Captain's Quarters:
Ben doesn't explain everything, and just because the left-wing bloggers were out to get him doesn't make them incorrect. The Daily Kos shows a strange piece of cribbing, as Michelle Malkin wrote, that not only occurred later in Ben's career (2001) but also shows much more intent than just cut-and-paste amnesia:
Ben Domenech wrote:
Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They're known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human. They are swollen, insectoid, the nightmare descendents of Lovecraftian grotesque — if only the filmmakers had created a plot that was as memorable.
Steve Murray, writing for the Cox News Service, wrote:
Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They're known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.” Swollen nightmares from a petri dish, they're the kind of grotesque whatsits horror writer H.P. Lovecraft would have kept as pets in his basement.
Ben was 19 (two years after his entanglement with the editors at his college newspaper) when these two articles appeared, and unless he wants to argue that Murray plagiarized Ben's work, I'd call that pretty damning. It's worse than dropping an unattributed quote into the review; he reworded Murray's imagery just enough to avoid an accusation that he lifted it word for word.