Plagiarism

I haven't written much about Ben Domenech, because he tore himself down quite well without my assistance, thank you very much. However, one point that kept coming up in the discussion bugs the daylights out of me. The records of his plagiarism start back when he worked on the newspaper at William & Mary. His defenders, and he himself, have made the case (before all the later crimes came to light) that he was just a college student, and we shouldn't expect college students to understand such subtleties as attribution or not copying someone else's words.

In Salon.com's War Room, Domenech is quoted as saying "The idea that the attack machine has gotten to the level where they dig back to your freshman year of college, when you’re 17, and say, 'Hey, this guy should have been thinking about the authority of what he was writing the same way that people do at the New York Times,' then, I mean, it’s idiotic," Domenech said Friday in an interview with Human Events Online.

That's BS, and he should know it. Plagiarism, as any self-respecting student knows, especially one working for a newspaper, is cheating. It's theft of another's intellectual property. Sure, it's widespread, because many students would rather cheat than have to do their own work, but if or when they get caught, the penalties often are severe. I've never failed a student in a class because of plagiarism, but I have given many a zero on an assignment, lab, or term paper, because, frankly, that's not acceptable.

I know that people on the right want to think that anything that has happened in the past, on their side at least, qualifies as a "youthful indiscretion" and should be forgiven. Sometimes, there are consequences to actions, and sometimes those are bad. This guy cheated, he stole, and now he's been disgraced. Everything else is just a distraction.