Because There's Nothing Wrong With Plagarism

You have got to love the gall of these people:

Readers have been curious to see if Times columnist Marueen Dowd would address the controversy that blossomed after she lifted a paragraph from Talking Points Memo and ran it in her column. She claimed the act was inadvertent and that a friend had emailed her the passage without telling her it was from TPM.

For those who don't know, Dowd plagiarized a paragraph from Josh Marshall, the publisher of TPM, a few weeks back.

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Readers are still wondering if Dowd will address the issue because her column hasn't run in the newspaper since May 20. Blogger Dan Kennedy wondered if there was a connection there and emailed the Times' spokeswoman for a response, which came back as this:

Maureen is on vacation. Since she didn't do anything wrong, there would be no reason for a suspension.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

It's like, these people think anything they say is TRUE, no matter how horribly they lie. They think they are talking to a bunch of babies just born, I swear.

Review the whole thing here, as Dowd copies everything except changing "we were" to "the Bush crowd was" from Marshall.

And the Times spokeswoman who talked to Kennedy today contradicts from what public editor Clark Hoyt said:

Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said journalists collaborate and take feeds from each other all the time. That is true with news articles, but readers have a right to expect that even if an opinion columnist like Dowd tosses around ideas with a friend, her column will be her own words. If the words are not hers, she must give credit.

Journalism severely gets hurt by this though. We all look bad when a thing like this goes down.

Alarmingly, we look even worse when the New York Times gives an inconsistent response like they did to Kennedy today.