What Maureen Dowd Wrote When Obama Was Accused of Plagiarism

Looks like Maureen Dowd stepped on a journalistic landmine--the old email from a friend that works its way, damn near verbatim, into your column. Happens all the time. Problem was that passage was from a post by TPM's Josh Marshall. Oopsie. Marshall won't comment on this, which is nice of him because it really looks like an honest mistake. But it is not a small mistake. This is clearly accidental because she's way too good of a writer to need any help. But it's so bloody unprofessional that her editors should probably shut her down for the summer just for that reason, not to mention that this is the former home of Jason Blair and Judith Miller.

But don't listen to me because I'm not the most sympathetic person when it comes to Dowd. She writes some great stuff and I really like it when she's on TV speaking extemporaneously, but when she injects the physical appearance of her subjects or debunked nonsensical gossip about her subjects into her work, it can have disastrous effects. Her tone during the 2000 presidential campaign was relatively common among members of the media. She was the worst offender when it came to shitting on Al Gore for all the wrong reasons.

However, her coverage of the 2008 election was pretty good. Looking back to her words from February of 2008, is particularly interesting given the current circumstances. Remember when Barack Obama was attacked relentlessly by conservatives, the media and the Clinton campaign for what they were calling plagiarism? Guess who had something to say about it? Maureen Dowd, that's who.

Here's some of what Dowd wrote (I assume):

Doin’ it her way, Hillary huffed to reporters on her plane: “If your whole candidacy is about words, they should be your own words.”

I guess that means if your whole candidacy is anti-words, you don’t have to use your own words.

The Clintons are known political cat burglars. They pilfered Republican jewels in the ’90s, and Hillary has purloined as much as she can stuff in her pantsuit from her husband and Barack Obama.

She changed to Change. She co-opted “It’s time to turn the page” and “Fired up and ready to go.” She couldn’t wait to shoplift the words “yes” and “can” from Obama’s trademark “Yes, we can!” — (which he appropriated from Cesar Chavez) — even though she was cagey enough to put them in separate slogans, “Yes, we will!” and “Americans still have that can-do spirit.”

Bill, master thief, got in on the act, too. After Obama said that his election would tell the world that America is back, Bill said that Hillary’s election would tell the world that America is back.

Although the only solid voting bloc in Wisconsin Hillary seemed to get was women over 60 years old, she did seem happy that the press had “finally,” as she put it, scrutinized him. America’s pretty boy was getting muddied up.

The Clinton camp has spent days trying to undermine Obama’s chief asset, the elegant language that has sparked a generational boom.

“We’re seeing a pattern here,” Hillary enforcer Howard Wolfson said, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. Yeah, we are. She’s losing, and looking for anything to bruise Obama.

Obama swiped a couple distinctive riffs about words and aspirations — his supposed specialty — from his pal Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, thereby violating the new cardinal rule not only of politics but of life: Don’t do anything you don’t want to see on the top favorites of YouTube.

RealClearPolitics blogger Tom Bevan wonders if a conservative like Charles Krauthammer had lifted Marshall's work, would Marshall be willing to comment then? The passage in question says:

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.

If Krauthammer had lifted that passage, we would all be worried about hiding from alien bodysnatchers, not petty cut-and-paste malpractice.