These are the professionals we're supposed to be mourning and scrambling to save, the ones whose work all the rest of us are supposedly sponging off of. You know, the ones a democracy can't function without.
Maureen Dowd, Pulitizer Prize winner. Today. New York Times:
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. Blogger. Last Thursday. Talking Points Memo:
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.
More discussion going on in bink's diary.
Update: And oh, yeah. It wasn't discovered by the ever-vigilant, self-policing traditional media. It was found by ... a TPM blogger.
Update 2: MoDo's excuse to NYTPicker:
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.
Followed by:
Maureen Dowd has responded to our request for clarification on her earlier comment. We wanted to know whether her friend had dictated the paragraph to her for inclusion in her column -- a logical assumption given that it repeated, word for word, Marshall's Thursday post.
Here's Dowd's email response to the NYTPicker:
no, we were going back and forth discussing the topic of the column and he made this point and i thought it was a good one and wanted to weave it in; i just didn't realize it was josh marshall's point, and we've now given him credit my friend didn't want to be quoted; but of course i would have been happy to give credit to another writer, as i often do
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(h/t to sc kitty)
Update 3: Commenter johnsonwax observes:
MoDos friend made the point so cogently
that even the commas fall in the same places. That's some seriously detailed conversation she has.
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Update 4: And now her column reads:
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.”
And this:
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.
