Is Maureen Dowd Lazy?

One of my former students and current workplace minion sent me this article on Maureen Dowd and her apparent plagiarism. She used a 43-word paragraph originally written by Josh Marshall of the political website Talking Points Memo in a recent column about Nancy Pelosi.

The similarity was first noticed by TPM on Sunday, and by the evening a mortified Dowd had apologized, saying she had not read Marshall's column but that evidently someone she knew had. "I was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing," she wrote in an e-mail to the Huffington Post among others, "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.' The Times amended the web version and noted the correction.

But, as the blogosphere quickly pointed out, this idea was not so much woven into the column as slathered in Elmer's and pasted right on. It seemed implausible, many noted, that Dowd could repeat word for word what she said she heard. Or that the friend had expressed the idea in precisely the same way as Marshall without knowing it. And if the idea was not her own, why didn't she attribute the friend? -- from Time.com

Does Maureen (who I am on a first name basis with in my mind) think she is above it all? Doe she even have an original thought or is she sapped of ideas for her columns? Does she think she should be treated differently because she is a columnist? Is the red dye seeping into her brain? All questions I don't have time to think about at the moment due to deadlines.

Photo by Alex Wong