If you’re going to plagiarize a paragraph, why would you plagiarize <i>this</i> paragraph?

Talking Points Memo noticed this sentence today in Maureen Dodd’s NY Times column:

“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 here’s almost exactly the same sentence, written by Josh Marshall 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.

Looks like Dowd has apologized, said it was unintentional, and the online version of her column now credits Marshall.

So, good.

But. If you’re going to lift somebody else’s writing, why would you pick such a rotten sentence as that? “When we were looking for what was essentially?” What is that?

It’s bad writing. That’s what it is. It’s an unnecessarily long, complex, better-have-the-good-GPS-installed kind of sentence. It puts clauses on top of clauses, inside of other clauses. Or whatever the hell they are. It isn’t funny or clever. It isn’t especially illuminating. It’s not something that you’re ever going to repeat to anyone else. It uses words like “seemed” and “mainly” and “essentially.” Timelines can’t “raise questions.” It’s a bad sentence.

Unless you’re Maureen Dowd, that is, which makes it plagiarizable.

Is it that there simply aren’t any good liberal writers? No one who can illustrate Bush-hatred through the written word with a little pithiness? A little style?

If you’re going to plagiarize a sentence, why that one?

If only she’d Dowdified it first.

Via Memeorandum.

UPDATE – Linked by The Blogprof, who notes a couple of ironies.

UPDATE II – Bloggasm wonders why Josh Marshall and the other bloggers at TPM won’t comment on the whole thing. You can bet if she’d cribbed me, I’d be commenting on it.