Psst

Serial plagiarist Ben Domenech has been getting fired and failing upward for years. (Which August speaks of here.) He made is all the way up the media ladder to a CBS blog where he asserted (it's cross-posted here) that potential Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is gay, a rumor that brought him under fire for his non-standards in the realm of facts.

He wrote a pretty weak defense at HuffPo:

I erroneously believed that Ms. Kagan was openly gay not because of, as Stein describes it, a "whisper campaign" on the part of conservatives, but because it had been mentioned casually on multiple occasions by friends and colleagues -- including students at Harvard, Hill staffers, and in the sphere of legal academia -- who know Kagan personally.

Yes, I believe that is called... wait - what is the term? Oh Right. A whisper campaign. I guess since they spoke at normal volume and didn't literally cup their hand and speak softly into Ben's ear there was no "whisper" and it wasn't a "campaign" in the sense that no one started a KaganIsGayPAC with printed literature, a twitter feed and a Board of Directors, but publishing unconfirmed rumors you overhear to elevate it to "fact" in conservative circles is not really what a journalist does. I'm guessing that Ben is a little confused about the definition of that word as well.

Maybe he should play "Telephone." It's a popular game where journalists call people and have them speak on the record. But I wouldn't expect a gay immigrant voodoo priest* like Domenech to do that.

*Overheard at a party