Men may not be necessary to Maureen Dowd, but a professional ethicist appears to be.

TPM:

Maureen Dowd in today's NY 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."

TPM's Josh Marshall 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."

Almost verbatim. Look, we bloggers take shortcuts and copy and paste others all the time. I do it because there are a whole host of people out there who write better than I. But we GIVE CREDIT when we do it, as I did above when acknowledging that this post came from TPM. For a Pulitzer Prize winner to lift work done by bloggers and pass it off as her own on the pages of the NY Times is just not cool.

UPDATE: MoDo admits to HuffPo that she lifted the words and will give Josh Marshall proper credit...but I'm puzzled by her alibi:

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.

Now am I mistaken, or did MoDo just excuse her plagiarism by saying that she actually was trying to plagiarize her friend?