Maureen Mimics Marshall

In what is the signature line of Maureen Dowd's column today, she actually took a stand and called for action. Many bloggers were taken aback by her rare advocacy of an actual position. But it seems Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made the same demand almost word for word on Thursday:

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.

Maureen's version (with the differences in bold):

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.

And the current online version:

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.”

Note that the handy little explanatory 'the Bush crowd' is now gone.

The Huffington Post has Dowd's denial of outright thievery, but it sure smells fishy:

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.

So her defense is that she stole from a friend rather than from a blog. So in her mind, she's only a second hand plagiarist. Either that or she is from the Doris Kearns Goodwin School of Sloppy Notekeeping. I'd easier believe that she is incompetent than a thief.

The story was broken by thejoshuablogs, a TPM groupie (like I have room to cast stones) that points out the irony of Dowd's role in the Biden plagiarism scandal.

So far Editor and Publisher, Gawker, the nytpicker, and Shakesville have made note of the issue. By morning every blogger in the known universe shall have chimed in. We'll see how the Gray Lady handles the storm. Dowd has weathered kerfuffles before but this one seems particularly clear cut and egregious.

Dick Dastardly and His Amazing Torture Machine

Cheney, Master of Pain
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 16, 2009

Dick Cheney is so comprehensively evil that Maureen Dowd has run out of villains to compare him to and has resorted to Hannah-Barbara cartoons of the 1970s.

Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest achievements.

And like the Snidlely Whiplash knock-off, Dick Dastardly Cheney has picked Nancy Pelosi to be his Penelope Pitstop. And like the lip-stick obsessed ingenue, Nancy engages in stereotypical female hopelessness.

Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time.

And we get a truly dastardly Alliteration Alert™ out of it.

That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.

And in a deeply veiled allusion we get our Movies With Maureen® Moment from the Harry Potter villains that doubles as a Dowdversion®.

The Bushies plied their dark arts in broad daylight.

And while Maureen is often slighted as being the dimmest bulb on the Times's Op-Ed Murderer's Row, she has clearly and unequivocally cut to the quick on what all this torture was about.

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.

Torture was never about saving American lives. It was about justifying Cheney's delusional paranoia. And that is truly dastardly.

Phantom Of The White House

Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

Rogue Diva of Doom
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 12, 2009

Sometimes Maureen Dowd gets a little carried away with her RudeNames® and epithets to the point of being too obscure. So here are the people she is really referring to in today's column.

Dick Cheney: Doomsday Dick, W.’s dark surrogate father

Rush Limbaugh: a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem

Colin Powell: a four-star general who spent his life serving his country

Sarah Palin: Rogue Diva (dethroned)

George W. Bush: W., Bush Junior

George Herbert Walker Bush: Bush 41, Poppy

Jeb Bush: the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother

In other Dowdisms, we get a Dowdversion™ (in addition to the sensible/scamp brother one above):

The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up.

And the Crossword Clue© Of The Week means lacking maturity or childish.

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

And in a major metaphor shift, Dubya has been accused at least three times of wrecking a symbolic car into either the globe, the global economy or diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf. Now we find that those weren't his hands on the wheel.

But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

And let's get this sneering face phantom off of his road show and back into his coffin.