It turns out that Maureen Dowd, editorialist at the New York Times, lifted a paragraph from Josh Marshall and put it in her Sunday column, "Cheney, Master of Pain." The paragraph was word-for-word something Marshall had written. She has admitted the infraction. It was, of course, "inadvertent." Here's the paragraph:
“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.”
In the corrected version, it now says, "As Josh Marshall says on his blog, 'More and more...'" The funny part is that this was one of Dowd's better columns. I read it, and thought, "Hey, this is not completely execreble!" Glenn Greenwald complimented her yesterday on her "uncharacteristically cogent and substantive column."
What may be even worse, it's not at all clear if Dowd actually did it. That is, she has an assistant who writes the so-called "spine" of the column, and then she goes in and supposedly jazzes it up with her lame jibes and snide remarks. (She gets paid well to do this.) If it turns out that her assistant cut-and-pasted, that's almost worse because it shows that whatever nuggets of sanity might have appeared in former columns was the work of the assistant, and the snarky off-point darts were Dowd's.
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