Dowd Sorry for 'Plagiarizing' Liberal Blog

Fans of Talking Points Memo did a doubletake when they got to a passage in Maureen Dowd's column yesterday on the timing of Bush use of torture; Josh Marshall had written the same thing—short of three words—three days back. Dowd has corrected her column online, and the New York Times issued a correction today, but she calls it an oversight, telling the Huffington Post that she had not read Marshall's blog, but was offered the sentence unattributed by a friend.

"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." The sentence: "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." 



(More Maureen Dowd stories.)