A conservative blogger just hired by the Washington Post—who once wrote that Coretta Scott King was a communist—has just been fired by the Post after he was discovered to have committed plagiarism. Ben Domenech, a founder of the conservative blog RedState.com who modestly writes under the nom de plume “Augustine,” lasted all of three days.

Domenech is not only a plagiarist, he’s also a liar. He tells the Times that he used material from P.J. O’Rourke with O’Rourke’s permission. O’Rourke, it turns out, has no memory of ever meeting or talking to Domenech.

Couple points. Well, three.

First, it’s always a pleasure to see smug, self-satisfied, obnoxious, Coretta Scott King-insulting conservatives take a fall.

Second, I’ve increasingly felt that the MSM is making a mistake by hiring extremely young people to write for them online when they’d never consider those people experienced enough to write for their dead-tree newspaper. It’s a bad idea for a host of reasons, not least of which is that online writing is increasingly becoming more important than what appears in print. Certainly more widely read. So why treat it as a kind of minor-league apprenticeship for writers? Because the people doing the hiring just don’t get the importance of the web.

Third, the MSM has double-standards for conservatives. The Post would never hire someone who’d written that Pat Robertson was a dickhead, which he is, but never mind. In their haste to appear balanced, the Post and other media hire people who make a name for themselves with vituperative rhetoric, and in that sense actually encourage the generation of such bile.

Over at RedState.com, Domenech’s defenders have this to say: “He’ll take the time to wander in the wilderness as he rightly should. He’ll walk that road. The least the rest of us can do is be waiting for him at its end.”

Gag me.