Maureen Dowd Admits Part of Op-Ed Is Eeerily Similar to TPM

Well, fancy that: A TPM Cafe blogger noticed how a passage in Maureen Dowd's Sunday op-ed column was very similar to a Talking Points Memo column, posted on Thursday, by TPM editor Josh Marshall. Dowd's passage read, "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." Marshall's was exactly the same, except he used "we were" instead of "the Bush crowd was." Dowd later admitted to the Huffington Post that it was a mistake—she was discussing the column with a friend "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." Gawker calls it BS and Politico's Michael Calderone has emailed Dowd, asking "if it's common practice to take an entire passage from a friend and weave it into her column." In the meantime, Dowd's column is updated, acknowledging Marshall.