I may owe Ben Domenech an apology.

At very least I will apologize to readers for being a little too quick to jump on this story and "write something".

Even after I posted the earlier piece, something nagged at me. I wondered if my own writing could withstand the scrutiny his did and I wondered about the lack of context for the accusations (not to mention the absence of motivation).

So I did some more searching and sure enough, Domenech has posted his side of things on Red State under his pen name of Augustine.

I can rebut several of the alleged incidents here. The most recent accusation, is that I stole a music review from Crosswalk and passed it off at National Review Online. In fact, I wrote both lists myself; I was one of Crosswalk's music review contributors at the time.

The Left has also accused me of foisting Sen. Frist quotes and some descriptive material from the Washington Post for a New York Press article on the Capitol Shooter. But the quotes I used were either properly credited or came from Sen. Frist’s press conference, which I attended along with many other reporters. So it is no surprise that we had similar quotes or similar descriptions of the same event. I have reams of notes and interviews about the events of that day. I also went over the entire piece step by step with NYPress editors to ensure that it was unquestionably solid before it ran.

Virtually every other alleged instance of plagiarism that I’ve seen comes from a single semester’s worth of pieces that were printed under my name at my college paper, The Flat Hat, when I was 17.

In one instance, I have been accused me of passing off P.J. O'Rourke's writing as my own in a column for the paper. But the truth is that I had met P.J. at a Republican event and asked his permission to do a college-specific version of his classic piece on partying. He granted permission, the piece was cleared with my editors at the paper, and it ran as inspired by O’Rourke’s original.

My critics have also accused me of plagiarism in multiple movie reviews for the college paper. I once caught an editor at the paper inserting a line from The New Yorker (which I read) into my copy and protested. When that editor was promoted, I resigned. Before that, insertions had been routinely made in my copy, which I did not question. I did not even at that time read the publications from which I am now alleged to have lifted material. When these insertions were made, I assumed, like most disgruntled writers would, that they were unnecessary but legitimate editorial additions.

ut all these specifics are beside the point. Considering that all of this happened almost eight years ago, and that there are no files or notes that I've kept from that brief stint, it is simply my word against the liberal blogosphere on these examples. It becomes a matter of who you believe.

The truth is, a more responsible teenager would've nipped this sort of thing in the bud. A less sloppy writer would have made sure that material copied from other places never made it into a published piece, and never necessitated apologies or explanations that will do nothing to stop the critics. I was wrong not to do so.

Domenech is convincing, and the left is not exactly disinterested in the outcome.

I feel more than a little foolish because frankly, the thing that put me over the top was how quickly he "resigned" (or was fired). I figured where there was smoke there was fire, and it didn't occur to me that the Washington Post, after showing the courage to actually put a conservative blogger on the payroll, would abandon the experiment at the least sign of criticism. I should have known better.

Time will tell I suppose--if the Post had the goods on Domenech, then they come off as principled and decisive in the defense of journalist ethics. If not, then they are going to have a hard time attracting blogging talent of any ideological stripe. Glenn Reynolds supports that view with this quote by Bill Quick:

Good heavens! If the Kossacks et al hated Domenech, can you imagine how they would feel about me? Not to mention the Bush-bots and the committed religious? And the field day they'd have rooting through my years and years of writing on the net, not just on blogs, but in newsgroups and my published work?

The only way they could run me as a blogger would be as "The Blogger Who Pisses Everybody Off." I doubt they are interested in that kind of thing.

UPDATE: The charges seem to have been dismissed on the bulk of the accusations, but not on the NRO movie review. Domenech has not responded specifically to that charge at this point.