Plagiarist Ben Domenech, inexplicably published by CBS News despite being forced to resign in disgrace from the Washington Post in 2006, promptly turns in a sleazy post smearing possible Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan — and the Obama administration pushes back, hard: White House complains about CBS News blog post saying that possible Supreme Court nominee is gay.

The White House ripped CBS News on Thursday for publishing an online column by a blogger who made assertions about the sexual orientation of Solicitor General Elena Kagan, widely viewed as a leading candidate for the Supreme Court.

Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration aide and Republican Senate staffer, wrote that President Obama would “please” much of his base by picking the “first openly gay justice.” An administration official, who asked not to be identified discussing personal matters, said Kagan is not a lesbian.

CBS initially refused to pull the posting, prompting Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director who is working with the administration on the high court vacancy, to say: “The fact that they’ve chosen to become enablers of people posting lies on their site tells us where the journalistic standards of CBS are in 2010.” She said the network was giving a platform to a blogger “with a history of plagiarism” who was “applying old stereotypes to single women with successful careers.”

The network deleted the posting Thursday night after Domenech said he was merely repeating a rumor.

An interesting bit of info about Domenech:

Domenech is editor of a year-old Web site called the New Ledger, from which the CBS column was reprinted. He is also editor of the City, a religion-oriented publication of Houston Baptist University.

Why are the religious fundamentalists always the first ones to dive into the gutter?

But it gets even better (or worse, depending on whether you think this kind of stuff is darkly amusing or not) — because Domenech now claims he was just trying to highlight something positive about Kagan. Shameless.

It’s an odd thing to get attacked by the White House for a blog post, and odder still when the attack is for something mentioned in passing, and intended to highlight a political positive about a potential Supreme Court nominee.