This reminds me of the time I had to flunk a kid because he handed in a Rudyard Kipling poem as his own and his defense was, "Oh, my friend gave that to me; I thought HE wrote it!"

It did not seem to occur to him - as it does not seem to occur to Dowd - that plagiarizing your friend's words is EXACTLY as bad as plagiarizing the published words of someone famous.

Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. Josh should be tickled.

Do you know what it is like to be under a deadline all the time. Work, work, work. The poor woman has to come up with original thoughts. She does what she can to meet that deadline.

Almost every Maureen Dowd column would be much better if she simply cut and pasted the requisite number of paragraphs from TPM.

(It seems more likely to me the friend emailed Dowd the paragraph, Dowd liked it, and pasted the paragraph into her column.)

If that were true though, then she could have admitted as much and claim her friend didn't want to be credited. There are rumors that Dowd lets research assistants write much of her columns these days. What are the odds one of them added the paragraph and she had nothing to do with it, but admitting as much would cost her her job?

Since the idea isn't particularly original, nor the wording all that elegant, I'll hold my anger for another story. However, if she says something like "damn his shit filled soul to hell", that would definitely be plagiarism. I mean that's original poetry. (h/t neill)

What a stain on Josh's reputation as a journalist, to be copied by a talentless hack. If she liked his words, they must have been completely inane, with added pulp romance novel references.

Josh should be ashamed of himself.

You know, Maureen Dowd is one of the few subjects on which both the right and the left agree: she's despised on both sides as being shallow, unfair and generally wrong. Her books don't sell all that well, so it doesn't look like there's some huge non-political audience that follows her.

But big-time bloggers on both sides continually link to her, driving up traffic to her column, and thus guaranteeing her continued prominent placement at the nation's leading newspaper.

Nice work if you can get it, I suppose, but I do wish people would stop playing the game.

I'm guessing inadvertent plagiarism. Sloppy and embarrassing, but not an attempt to knowingly pass off someone else's writing as her own. (For one, it's too darn easy to check and confirm.)

Until proven otherwise.

I am guessing Maureen Dowd -- or an assistant/intern helping to gather info for her column -- pulled down various news and blog articles into a computer file and this passage ended up getting plugged in without attribution. Perhaps she was tired and thought it was her own prose. It resonated when she saw it and she thought it was a restatement in her own writing.

(I know that I frequently remember good points made in others' original blogposts without remembering specifically who said what on what blog. Which does not mean the no attribution is fair for a column published in the NYTimes. She had a duty to double-check against her sources and attribute.)

Wrong? Yes. Mistake? Most likely. Plagiarism: not sure about that, and the waffly "explanation" muddies the water further.

I think she's been caught being very sloppy, and that someone with a lot more time on their hands is doublechecking her previous columns even now.

If this has happened on several occasions? We'll know soon enough.

I missed this duck

Beyond the plagiarism is the idea itself. I've been asserting for years Bush authorized and insisted on torture. But I never saw this angle. As far as I know Krugman was the first to get there:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link. There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

Who cares. You all should be writing about the substance of the message not the messangers. This is how every friggin' important message in this country gets sidetracked to the point of nausea. Onto the Hague!

"So how do you think Maureen Dowd would react if..."

Bitchily. That's the answer, regardless of what the end of the sentence is.

That's not much of a response. The friend told Dowd an exact-word quote, including the commas, and she "weaved" it into her column? (It seems more likely to me the friend emailed Dowd the paragraph, Dowd liked it, and pasted the paragraph into her column.)

People wonder why the NY Times is going under. After seeing this, they really shouldn't.

I'm guessing inadvertent plagiarism. Sloppy and embarrassing, but not an attempt to knowingly pass off someone else's writing as her own.

In my (college) history classes, I tell my students that inadvertent plagiarism is still plagiarism, and I penalize them accordingly when I catch them. I was drilled in scrupulous attention to where you get your sources and ideas in grade school, and I know that if I make a mistake through sloppy note-taking, it's my fault.

I'd assumed that Dowd would chalk this up to a careless error, perhaps pin it on a research assistant, explain that she meant to credit TPM, and express contrition over the mix-up.

"Live by the pen, die by the pen" "The pen is mightier than the sword" after all. Quotes (corrupted)by Jesus, according to the Book of Matthew and Edward Bulwer Lytton, from his play Richelieu.

I recall an interview with Mo' from some time ago in which she complained that it was tough to write a column in the Age of the Intertubes because you never knew if someone else had enjoyed a flash of brilliance identical to your own. Seems as though she wasn't kidding.

Karma is a bitch.

You are welcome to express the next logical sentence yourself.

I think the worst part is that she's bragging that she doesn't read TPM. That's negligence right there.

I see that the "corrected" column doesn't have a link to the original story. The way she mentions "Josh Marshall" makes him sound like some random guy who has a quaint personal diary online-- instead of her competitor or peer.

My guess: MD uses a young ghost writer for her column, who has now been fired or threatened with being fired. The ghost at least reads TPM.

Dowd's explanation is, to put it mildly, unpersuasive. In fact, Jamison Foser asks the right question: "So how do you think Maureen Dowd would react if, say, Joe Biden ripped off a few dozen of someone else's words, then offered up an excuse this lame? Or if Al Gore did?"

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/05/023580.php

Maybe if Josh Marshall had written about this, the NY Times would have published it.

Lol! Thank you jcricket! Karma really iS a bitch.

To be generous to Dowd, I might guess that she is covering for an assistant of some sort, who was cutting and pasting to get this essay together. Of course, it also means not having to admit that she, Dowd, doesn't do much actual writing herself any longer. In any case, it would have made far more sense, if you were going to lie, to simply say that you did read Marshall's column, wanted to use his argument, and simply forgot to properly cite it. Instead, she puts out this pretty implausible lie. Dowd is proving how stupid she really is.

maureen Dowd should take Nancy Pelosi by the hand and enroll them both in the a C.Y.A. (cover Your Ass)class on how to lie better.

Just to add to the Modo pile-on, I can't help but point out that she was the one responsible for nearly destroying Joe Biden's career back in 1988 with her revelation that he had lifted passages from Neal Kinnock's TV ad for a speech he gave in Iowa. (And it was a nasty little piece of work, too.)

I welcome her efforts to branch out (she actually calls for a full investigation of the torture regime in this op-ed). If she wrote it, we'd actually have a decent column here, aside from the Dowd-esque characterization of Nancy Pelosi as a "stammering child." Anyway, if you're going to steal, you could do worse than Josh Marshall. It would be fun to see Dowd behind a phalanx of flags answering questions about this incident, surely in the manner of a stammering child herself. But of course that would assume a certain level of media accountability.

Regarding Biden, Maureen would simply state that the standards for an opinion writer are different from those of a presidential candidate. We expect candidates to be truthful; we know op-ed writers are not.

I welcome her efforts to branch out (she actually calls for a full investigation of the torture regime in this op-ed). If she wrote it, we'd actually have a decent column here, aside from the Dowd-esque characterization of Nancy Pelosi as a "stammering child." Anyway, if you're going to steal, you could do worse than Josh Marshall. It would be fun to see Dowd behind a phalanx of flags answering questions about this incident, surely in the manner of a stammering child herself. But of course that would assume a certain level of media accountability.

About 2 1/2 years ago, the WSJ's John Fund lifted some material from my blog.

When I contacted him, he apologized and said his original copy included an attribution, but an editor had removed it without his knowledge. Not terribly persuasive.

But he did run an attribution in an italicized kicker at the end of a subsequent column.

http://tcextra.com/terrycowgill/2006/09/11/fund-issues-attribution/

I suspect this kind of thing happens all the time. Good for JMM for confronting MoDo.

Wow- does Martin Luther King know about this????

Perhaps Josh should start his next blog with, "It was a dark and stormy night . . .", and see if that shows up in one of Dowd's columns.

The scent is still strong enough on the torture/Al Queda/Saddam trail for Maureen to lead other hounds off it like happened with Dan Rather's investigation of W's AWOL with the Texas air national guard.

But I do wonder if Maureen really did write that column because there was no surly criticism of anyone's clothing, makeup or hair do.

Other than the plagiarism, the last couple of columns that the narcissistic wench wrote were some of her better ones lately. She got some damn good digs in against Cheney.

She could not have credit because she wanted to insert "the Bush crowd." Giving credit for the slightly altered text would have created an even bigger fuss. She thought she might get awway with it, too bad she got caught.

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work." - Emile Zola (1840-1902)

In my office recently, I responded to questions about "green shoots" in our economy by saying, "The green shoots are all weeds."

Yesterday I did a Google search and found that several other people wrote something very similar.

The two nouns "green shoots" and "weeds" are the heart of the sentence and the rest of it is grammatical filler. It's not surprising that several minds conceived of the same idea independently. I accuse no one of plagiarism nor do I admit plagiarism.

But Dowd remembering 44 spoken verbatim from a second-hand source who remembered the same 44 written words, verbatim, from a blog is extraordinary. HuffPo must've hired TWO autistic savants.

I once commented on a Charles Krauthammer piece on RealClearPolitics. The next Sunday morning, Krauthammer repeated my statement, nearly verbatim, without attribution. I didn't expect him to attribute the statement to a commenter called POWinCA on national television. I was flattered and glad the statement went out. The essential difference there was that Krauthammer was just having a political conversation and my words had entered the public domain. I offered them up on his article rather than posting them in my blog. I wouldn't accuse him of plagiarism.

WOOT, do you routinely plaigiarise Digby, or was it just for fun this one time?

Ms Dowd is of that generation which doesn't fully comprehend the scope of the "intertubes". They've been sneering at bloggers for so long, thy actually believe that bloggers are no-count, mama's boys, typing away in their parent's basement. And that nobody sane (ie NYT readers) pays any attention to them. So, 1) nobody's gonna catch the plagiarism and 2) if someone does, well, it's not real plagiarism, since it was on the intertubes, where nothing worth attention ever appears.

Sheer lack of understanding and imagination. And yes, karma is a FM K9

Look, cutting and pasting what other people say -- whether they say it themselves or quote someone else and perhaps not say that -- enters dangerous territory for writers. If I were Dowd I wouldn't co-opt what anyone else said; if I used a pal's words, I'd identify them. But the commas? Bum rap. They're where commas go -- I don't see how you could write that sentence (or co-opt it) any other way and have it read smoothly. FWIW, I think Dowd may not read TPM. But she does talk to friends it seems, and uses them in columns (remember the awful and hilarious Thunder and Lightning from poor terrified David Brooks?)