Maureen Dowd, Plagiarist?

A blogger at TPM Cafe says the New York Times' star columnist Maureen Dowd plagiarized his boss's work.

The Huffington Post describes it as Dowd, "inadvertently lifting lines."

You be the judge...

Last Thursday, Talking Points Memo founder, Josh Marshall, wrote a column about the use of waterboarding during the Bush administration, saying:

"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."

On Sunday, Dowd also penned a column about the use of torture during the Bush administration. She 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."

A blogger at TPM Cafe, who also writes The JoshuaBlog, saw the nearly word-for-word similarities between the two, and slammed Dowd online, "NYT's Dowd Plagiarizes TPM's Josh Marshall."

The Huffington Post picked up on the blogger's accusation, contacted Dowd, and published her response, under the headline "Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Lines from TPM's Josh Marshall."

Here is Dowd's explanation:

"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."

Dowd has now changed her column to read, "Josh Marshall said in his blog: "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 Times has also added an editorial note, "'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."

The TPM blogger's response? "Yeah, she was told "the line" by someone? The line? She should have just said it was an error and that she meant to credit him. This "heard the line" is, well, a line."

So is it plagiarism or "inadvertently lifting lines"? You be the judge...