I’m wondering if The New York Times will replace professional smart alec Maureen Dowd in the op-ed stable or just save money and downsize the columnist contingent by one.

Her latest column takes a paragraph’s clever observation straight from a blogger, save the changing of two words. See it here.

Her explanation: She was a telling a friend by phone what she writing about. The friend said something on the issue to her. She so liked what her friend said that she incorporated it into her column. She had no idea, she says, that her friend must have just read the Talking Points Memo blog and was saying pretty much word for word what had already been written by a blogger.

Is that a believable explanation? As Maureen’s only fan in the media around here, so far as I know, I can only answer that it strains credulity — this being a rather long line to survive near-verbatim repetition twice — but is possible, yes.

Somebody is bound to say this is proof we don’t need newspapers anymore. But I would say that one smart-alec columnist does not make a newspaper, as much as I’d like to think one does.