Maureen Dowd’s Cut-and-Paste Column

Maureen Dowd, queen of the cool kids, has been reduced to trolling leftist blogs for material.  Her writing displays all the maturity of a self-absorbed teenager anyway, but passing off content copied from the web as her own surely confirms the impression.

Dowd’s Sunday opinion column in The New York Times featured this line:

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.

Which is an obvious lift from this blog entry from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

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.

Dowd explained what happened in a letter to the Huffington Post:

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.

(Note that writing in all lowercase is tres chic.)

First of all, it wasn’t actually a “line.”   A line is pithy, and sticks in your head.  This was a complex sentence which Dowd copied.   Her claim that a friend read this sentence, and spontaneously used it when speaking to Dowd, who then used it in her column, would not convince anyone who ever played the “telephone game.”

Secondly, isn’t it pathetic that the only change Dowd made before publishing this in the New York Times as her own was to make a leftist blog post less civil to Bush?

"This stuff is gold! Pablo, fetch me my scissors!"

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