Maureen Dowd Admits That She Plagiarized Words From Leftwing Blogger

YahooNews.com:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution.

Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to The Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.

The newspaper issued a formal correction Monday saying Dowd "failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse" to Marshall's blog.

The error appeared in Dowd's Sunday column, in which she criticized the Bush administration's use of interrogation methods in the run-up to the Iraq war.

In the original column, Dowd wrote: "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."

Marshall last week wrote virtually the same sentence. But where Dowd's column used the phrase "the Bush crowd was," Marshall used "we were."

Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, told The Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall's post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall's blog.

Dowd's guilty of plagiarism and at the very least should be suspended. Shows you the credibility of the Pulitzer when an award-winning journalist has to lift sentence's line-by-line from a blogger. Shows you the credibility of the NYTimes' editorial staff that this crime got past them, esp. in light of the Jayson Blair scandal several years ago. Shows you the credibility of Dowd, a writer whose made millions over the years with her radical feminist, hate-filled rants towards men and the Right.

A "friend" gave it to her?!? Anyone who'd buy that line is an idiot.