Maureen Dowd's plagiarism excuse

Harvard Crimson/Alexandra P. Kass

You'd think a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer could come up with something better than the PR equivalent to "the dog ate my homework."

"josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now. i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow."

This is what Maureen Dowd told the The NYTPicker.

She lifted material from a blog published last Thursday on the Talking Points Memo (TPM) website. Here's the original post by Josh Marshall:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Now here's Dowd's from yesterday's New York Times:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

And this is the woman who blasted Joe Biden for plagiarism in one of his speeches. I wonder what repercussions she's going to face from the editors. What they should do is publish an op-ed about the incident, titled, "An Echo from a Blog."