Maureen Dowd: Plagiarist

The answer is: Maureen Dowd, Joe Biden, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Who are plagiarists?

That is correct!

Dowd claims her act of plagiarism happened inadvertently. It appears in her New York Times Sunday column, "Cheney, Master of Pain."

Poor Maureen. I suppose she was so eager to demonize Dick that she lost her head. She probably blames Cheney for getting her into this entire mess.

How does one "inadvertently" write a lengthy sentence virtually word-for-word?

It doesn't happen.

From the Associated Press:

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.

Dowd had no choice but to acknowledge her "error."

What else could she do? Claim it was a coincidence?

She probably thought about it, but realized that explanation wouldn't fly.

The newspaper is expected to issue a formal correction Monday. A request for comment from The Associated Press was not immediately returned by the Times late Sunday.

That should be interesting. The correction will not be an admission of wrongdoing by Dowd. It will just be an "oops!"

The New York Times has too many black marks on its record to count. What's one more?

Dowd e-mailed the Huffington Post, Left-wing website, to explain her "error."

She writes:

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.

That sounds really lame.

Does Dowd make a habit of talking to her friend and then transcribing what she thought was a spontaneous expression of a point to include in her own column?

If this isn't actually an imaginary friend existing only in Dowd's head, Dowd's friend had to be reading straight from the blog.

I assume her friend never thought that Dowd was taking notes during their conversation.

Here's what Josh Marshall 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 we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Here's what 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.

I really don't know how Dowd could have managed to get all that written down during what she assumed was a spontaneous conversation with her friend.

When Dowd says she was talking to a friend, does she mean communicating via a written exchange, such as e-mail?

Did Dowd do a simple copy and paste?

She claims she didn't know Josh Marshall wrote it. Even if that's the case, Dowd still was using someone else's words in her column and failed to give proper attribution.

This is really an embarrassment for lib Queen Bee Dowd.

The sentence Dowd lifted is too complex for her to have committed to memory by simply hearing it.

Dowd's assertion that she wanted to weave the friend's idea into her column is goofy. She didn't "weave" an idea. She slapped over 40 words verbatim into her column.

Dowd's explanation makes matters worse.

This incident calls into question her credibility. How often does someone else do her writing?

Which words belong to Dowd and which ones come from "a friend"?

A formal correction is owed to Josh Marshall, but it doesn't solve the problem for Dowd.

She's been exposed.

She didn't write her own column. She allegedly passed off the words of someone else as her own without attribution.

Dowd was quoting her friend. There was nothing inadvertent about that.

If her story is to be believed, she knew that she was lifting the words of her friend, but not the words of a blogger.

If that's true, I bet Dowd is royally ticked at the friend for giving her the impression the words were original and not ripped off.

It's possible the friend never thought that Dowd would literally reprint the passage.

It's also possible that Dowd fabricated this lame story because she was caught plagiarizing. It's possible an instance of Dowd's original work is creating this "friend" of convenience.

Either way, it's bad.
_____________________

Here's the "oops" correction:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo. A corrected version appears online at nytimes.com/opinion.

Let's be more direct and accurate.

It was Dowd's failure. This correction makes it sound like Dowd was victimized by her column.