Those who are getting exercised over Dowd's alleged plagiarism (intentional use of someone else's material as if it were one's own) must believe that this hyper-intelligent journalist, writing for one of the most widely read newspapers in the world, thought her borrowings from a popular political website would go unnoticed. That scenario would be plausible only if one additionally assumed that Dowd had, for reasons medical, emotional or psychiatric, taken leave of her senses. Do her scolds have any evidence that she was exiled from reality at the time she wrote an otherwise rational and cogent column? If so, would they please present it.

"Do her scolds have any evidence that she was exiled from reality at the time she wrote an otherwise rational and cogent column? If so, would they please present it." Hell yes! The evidence is her entire body of work from the last two years or so. She was always spiteful and snarky, but during the last Presidential campaign, with more at stake than I can remember in a fairly long lifetime, she devoted herself with a single-minded passion to the most utterly pointless, trivial gossip imaginable, combined with a scorched-earth attack on the manhood (or womanhood, as the case might be) of any and all viable Democratic candidates. Now, I'm under no impression that Dowd is a liberal or a Democrat, although she has somehow gotten that reputation, don't ask me how. But if she can't manage anything more intelligent or mature than Ann Coulter's "f@ggot" smear, what is the New York Times doing paying her for this bibulous blather?

pardonme:

Those who are getting exercised over Dowd's alleged plagiarism (intentional use of someone else's material as if it were one's own) must believe that this hyper-intelligent journalist, writing for one of the most widely read newspapers in the world, thought her borrowings from a popular political website would go unnoticed. That scenario would be plausible only if one additionally assumed that Dowd had, for reasons medical, emotional or psychiatric, taken leave of her senses. Do her scolds have any evidence that she was exiled from reality at the time she wrote an otherwise rational and cogent column? If so, would they please present it.

Please present evidence that Maureen Dowd is "hyper intelligent". Can she solve a difficult differential equation problem? Beat a grandmaster in chess or do a Rubik's Cube?

Or is generating a few snarky shots at the likes of Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney sufficient evidence of "hyper-intelligence"?

Mister Person, I assume your area of specialization has been scientific, hence your choice of criteria. There are relatively few columnists and commentators who write as incisively, creatively and wittily as Maureen Dowd -- and I doubt that any members of that select group are mathematicians or chess masters. Dowd's mind sparkles. I do believe she is hyper-intelligent; however, my argument would lose none of its point if "hyper" were replaced by "highly." In fact, she would have to be intellectually impaired to believe that lifting a sentence from a Politico blog would go unnoticed.

Pardonme-

Inarguable. Dowd's brilliance is simply inarguable. "Earth tones". What a mind that woman has. The contributions she has made to political discourse.

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Or, did you mean she was an evil genius?

lets see how her mind "sparkles". she makes up phony conversations and phony personalities that will some how make the point that every candidate in the 2008 presidential race is calculatingly evil except for her chosen candidate. she never takes a stand on any issue and only comes out against things. she never offers any solution to a problem but only belittles anyone that does offer solutions that she does not like. there is no basis and you can not show one column in the past few years that shows this women is "highly intelligent". she is a scam, a sham and a phony who says nothing, offers nothing and makes her newspaper look like a joke for paying her.

She didn't think she was lifting from a popular website - she thought she was lifting from a friend. That doesn't make it less of an infraction. Didn't we all learn in middle school that you're not allowed to copy a friend's work?

Rather than pointlessly debating Ms. Dowd's intelligence, mkm28 seems to have found a way around pardonme's appeal to Occam's Razor. It does seem strange to me that the friend's quote was so exact, assuming said friend was quoting (without attribution - not really a biggie in an email) from memory, but the alternative requires that Dowd have almost no common sense.

But that's the problem with (nonstudent) plagiarists: plagiarism is almost always irrational. Plagiarists take outlandish risks for very little reward. (I except students because student plagiarism is often a rational, if unprincipled, reaction to the jam they got in by making foolish decisions.)

Another note is that 'casual' plagiarists (ones that borrow phrases and paragraphs to improve a work, rather than lifting ideas or entire papers wholesale) are usually serial plagiarists. So an in-depth look at Dowd's oeuvre migh be in order.

--Devin Carless

(Parts of this post were not lifted from Franklin Foer or Marilyn Randall, but they're much better informed about plagiarism than some guy on the internets who heard something from a psychiatrist.)

The OP defines plagiarism as "intentional use of someone else's material as if it were one's own."

Wrong. Intention has nothing to do with it.

Dowd is not an alleged plagiarist. She may be an inadvertent plagiarist, but there is nothing "alleged" about it: she stole words.