How can someone recite punctuation?

I went to the movies, so I missed the entire Dowd/Marshall showdown. Here is the skinny:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is being accused of plagiarizing from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall.

This afternoon, a blogger named "thejoshuablog" (not Marshall) at TPM Cafe claimed that a paragraph in Dowd's Sunday column matches a paragraph from Josh Marshall's story that appeared on TPM last Thursday.

Then there is this update:

UPDATE: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in an email to Huffington Post, admits that a paragraph in her Sunday column was lifted from Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall's blog last Thursday.

Dowd claims that she never read his blog last week but was told the line by a friend of hers. In a follow-up email, she forwarded her desire to apologize to Marshall, writing that had she known, she would have gladly credited Marshall

Sorry, I don't think so. It is nearly an identical paragraph. Plus, did her friend mention the line (the whole paragraph) while stopping to note the punctuation? Let's examine the two. I will mark the differences in red for you:

Here is what Marshall wrote:

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.

Here is Dowd:

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.

While I commend Dowd for apologizing, her excuse is idiotic. I commend her because when the AP lifted my article and my research, they refused to attribute me or to apologize. Yet Dowd clearly thinks we are incapable of seeing the obvious. She could have said she forgot to credit Marshall or better still, admit that she lifted this portion. But look at the two side by side. As you can see from what I have marked in red, there is nearly no difference between the two paragraphs.