NYT's Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM's Josh Marshall

Via thejoshuablog, Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times contains a paragraph that, with the exception of four words, looks to be a direct and uncredited lift from Josh Marshall at TPM. See for yourself.

Ms. Dowd:

"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."

Josh Marshall on

Thursday, May 14, 2009

:

"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."

The difference is "the Bush crowd was" in Ms. Dowd's column and "we were" in Josh's.

***

UPDATE: The column now has a footnote: An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

Ah, the passive voice to the rescue: "Mistakes were made." It's meant to sound like an editing error. Feh.