Whoops!
Can't wait to hear what the explanation for this is.
Text from Josh Marshall's TPM post on Thurs.:
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.
Text from the Dowd column:
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.
Kinda weird, hunh ...
I guess that the problem was that Google somehow went into the future and grabbed the page from the Dowd column and magically transported it back in time to the Marshall post and ... and ...
Hmm.
I'm sure that there must be an explanation for how this happened out there somewhere.
Does Ms. Dowd clip pieces of text from news articles and other commentary and keep them in a word file for research reference while she is writing? Does she have a ghost writer? An intern?
Is it possible that Josh Marshall receives advance copy of the Dowd column and accidentally -- or purposefully -- duplicated a piece of it in his post? (Jeez -- I hope not!)
Let's see how this mystery unfolds.
(I got the story from Atrios, by the way.)
UPDATE: Here is Dowd's response:
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in an email to Huffington Post, admits that a paragraph in her Sunday column was lifted from Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall's blog last Thursday.
Dowd claims that she never read his blog last week but was told the line by a friend of hers. In a follow-up email, she forwarded her desire to apologize to Marshall, writing that had she known, she would have gladly credited Marshall.
So ... There you have it. Dowd says that a friend gave her the line and she included it in the column, nor realizing that it was a quote from Talking Points Memo.
FINAL UPDATE: You know, it just struck me that her friend could be Josh Marshall and they were having a conversation over IM or some other Internet chat and ... Well, they both ended up quoting the same text from the conversation.
In that case, I guess ...
Well, I don't know what to guess.
