Sunday, May 17, 2009

Maureen Dowd: Plagerist!

Seems as if Maureen Dowd was caught fairly red-handed plagerizing a prominent far-left blog, Talking Points Memo. For the curious, the passage lifted directly from the blog's proprieter was:

"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."

Old MoDo just did a cut-and-paste, changed "we were" to "the Bush crowd", patted herself on the back and called it a day. Which brings to mind two questions:

- how much of Maureen Dowd - and the rest of the media's - own talking points come from frothing far-left blogs such as Talking Points? Does she balance her views out by reading, say, Powerline or The Corner or Drudge or Gateway Pundit or even Instapundit? Yeah...that's what I think, too....

-how clueless is the emminent Miss Dowd about the internet and the blogosphere in general if she believes she can lift the significant original thoughts of others and simply claim them as her own without being immediately detected?

If MoDo can't come up with an original ugly thought by herself and needs to lift them from the left-wing hate machine, then she should be put out to pasture, permanently. And if the media as a whole is taking their leads from blogs like these, then the whole concept of an unbiased press is even more laughable than previously presumed, and perhaps we ought to re-think some of the protections these folks are given under law.

Will she admit & apologize, or dodge, weave, and deny?

Well, this is a liberal we're talking about, so expect this to somehow be Dick Cheney's fault by sometime tomorrow morning...

Update: The Dowd op-ed linked to above now reads "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. " Still doesn't answer either of my two questions...

Update II: Pathetic excuse, as expected, can be found here (towards bottom). Weak.

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