Maureen Dowd has admitted that she indeed borrowed some words from TPM’s Joshn Marshall’s blog post. She said in report that it was inadvertent.

Maureen Dowd is a Washington D.C. based columnist for the New York Times. She was with the Times since 1983. That was the time when she joined as a metropolitan reporter. In 1999, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to her for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The controversy started when the following 45-word passage appeared in Dowd’s column, entitled “Cheney, Master of Pain,” on Sunday:

“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.”

If you take a look at Marshall’s 43-word passage from a Talking Points Memo post on Thursday entitled “Bubbling,” you would find that the the passages are almost exactly the same. The post reads as follows:

“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.”

The similarities were caught by a TPM contributor on Sunday afternoon who pointed out that the only difference between Dowd’s words and Marshall’s words was that Dowd made use of the phrase “we were instead of “the Bush crowd was.”

On the night of Sunday, there were emails to “The Nytpicker,” which is a blog devoted to covering the goings-on at the New York Times and the Huffington Post. Dowd admitted that the similarities weren’t accidental and that she had indeed plagiarized Marshall. However, she blamed the mishap squarely on one of her friends.

Dowd explained: “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.”