Hillary Clinton’s loss of the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump was so traumatic for members of the Democrat elite that a form of PTSD appears to have taken hold, relegating all memory of the candidacy itself to amnesia. That’s the only plausible explanation for a stunning column published by one of the paper’s stars, Maureen Dowd, and then excerpted in a tweet, completely relegating the Clinton-Kaine ticket to the memory hole.

Here is a screen grab of the tweet that has since been deleted and replaced:

(via Twitchy)

It didn’t take long for mentally competent political observers to remind Dowd, the editorial page editors who also forgot Clinton-Kaine and went ahead and published the column, and the other staff at the New York Times responsible for the Twitter feed  that it’s been 4 years since a man and a woman ran together on Democrat ticket. Whoever posts Hillary Clinton’s tweets was among them:

Either @TimKaine and I had a very vivid shared hallucination four years ago or Maureen had too much pot brownie before writing her column again. https://t.co/J3SSwtkg7x

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 8, 2020

Hillary Clinton (left) and Maureen Dowd

Compiled from public domain photos https://www.flickr.com/photos/statephotos/5486234579  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maureen_Dowd_1.JPG

Twitchy has a collection of sarcastic tweets, my favorite of which is:

NYT is definitely going to be suicided for this one. pic.twitter.com/17yVzAXIny

— NewAccountWhoDis? (@It_Me_Who_Dis) August 8, 2020

The Times also changed the text of Dowd’s column online and noted a correction:

Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly said it had been 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket. It has been that long since a man chose a woman to run as his vice president. We’ve deleted a tweet that repeated the error.

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 8, 2020

Alas, the statement “It has been that long since a man chose a woman to run as his vice president” is also incorrect.  It’s been only 8 years since a male presidential nominee picked a woman as his running mate, but John McCain and Sarah Palin were Republicans, so they don’t count at all in the world of the New York Times.

On its third try, the Times finally got it right:

It’s hard to fathom, but it has been 36 years since a man chose to put a woman on the Democratic ticket with him, writes @MaureenDowd. To use Geraldine Ferraro’s favorite expression, “Gimme a break!” https://t.co/Oe5TovtONz

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 8, 2020

John Hinderaker of Powerline characterizes the incident as an example of the decline of the Times and its star columnists:

…this episode illustrates once again the apparent absence of any editorial oversight at papers like the Times. Does the Times actually employ editors? It is hard to imagine that anyone other than Dowd laid eyes on her column before it saw the light of day. The Times strikes me as a press organization in a state of terminal decline.

That’s certainly true. But I also read into the mass amnesia something about Hillary Clinton’s standing among the thought leaders (such as they are) of the Democrats’ media arm.  She let them down so badly that she is, in effect, a nonperson, like one of Stalin’s purged officials, someone who never existed at all. That’s why there was never a “Draft Hillary” movement as the Democrats cast around for a candidate to take on their most hated president since Lincoln.

This is probably the most fitting punishment for Hillary Clinton’s sheer awfulness. It’s better to be loved than hated, but it’s better to be hated than forgotten.