A howl of outrage went up on the Twitterverse and the offending sentence was quickly fixed, although the NYT can't bring themselves to apologize for the error:
Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly said it had been 36 years since a man and a woman ran on a Democratic Party ticket. It has been that long since a man chose a woman to run as V.P. on the Democratic ticket. We’ve deleted a tweet that repeated the error.— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 8, 2020
Fortunately for history, Daniel Larison had grabbed a screenshot of the original NYTimes Opinion tweet:
— Daniel Larison (@DanielLarison) August 8, 2020
Hillary weighed in too:
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
It was entertaining, but all is well for the moment and there's not much else to say except c'mon Joe Biden, put us all out of our quadriennial Veepstakes misery and announce your pick soon!
But wait. "A very vivid hallucination," "Too much pot brownie"? What's that about? Hill is referring to a column Dowd published on June 3, 2014. Titled Don't Harsh Our Mellow, Dude, this is what it said:
The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.
Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.
What could go wrong with a bite or two?
Everything, as it turned out.
Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.
But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.
I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.
It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly. The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.
I reckoned that the fact that I was not a regular marijuana smoker made me more vulnerable, and that I should have known better. But it turns out, five months in, that some kinks need to be ironed out with the intoxicating open bar at the Mile High Club.
Colorado raked in about $12.6 million the first three months after pot was legalized for adults 21 and over. Pot party planners are dreaming up classy events: the Colorado Symphony just had its first “Classically Cannabis” fund-raiser with joints and Debussy. But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.
In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.
As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.
“We realized there was a problem because we’re watching everything with the urgency of the first people to regulate in this area,” said Andrew Freedman, the state’s director of marijuana coordination. “There are way too many stories of people not understanding how much they’re eating. With liquor, people understand what they’re getting themselves into. But that doesn’t exist right now for edibles for new users in the market. It would behoove the industry to create a more pleasant experience for people.
“The whole industry was set up for people who smoked frequently. It needs to learn how to educate new users in the market. We have to create a culture of responsibility around edibles, so people know what to expect to feel.”
Gov. John Hickenlooper and the Legislature recently created a task force to come up with packaging that clearly differentiates pot cookies and candy and gummy bears from normal sweets — with an eye toward protecting children — and directed the Department of Revenue to restrict the amount of edibles that can be sold at one time to one person. The governor also signed legislation mandating that there be a stamp on edibles, possibly a marijuana leaf. (Or maybe a stoned skull and bones?)
The state plans to start testing to make sure the weed is spread evenly throughout the product. The task force is discussing having budtenders give better warnings to customers and moving toward demarcating a single-serving size of 10 milligrams. (Industry representatives objected to the expense of wrapping bites of candy individually.)
“My kids put rocks and batteries in their mouths,” said Bob Eschino, the owner of Incredibles, which makes candy and serves up chocolate and strawberry fountains. “If I put a marijuana leaf on a piece of chocolate, they’ll still put it in their mouths.”
He argues that, since pot goodies leave the dispensary in childproof packages, it is the parents’ responsibility to make sure their kids don’t get hold of it.
“Somebody suggested we just make everything look like a gray square so it doesn’t look appealing. Why should the whole industry suffer just because less than 5 percent of people are having problems with the correct dosing?”
Does he sound a little paranoid?
And one more thing. Was Hillary being just a little bit snarky in her tweet about Dowd's mistake? Yes. Why? In 1999 Dowd won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of 10 columns she wrote in 1998, in which she gleefully shredded Bill Clinton for his activities with Monica Lewinsky. (The Pulitzer committee cited her "fresh and insightful columns on the impact of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.") What did she say, exactly? Consider:
January 25, 1998:
Let's review what we've learned so far.
The President a liar? Knew that.
The President a philanderer? Knew that.
The President reckless in the satisfaction of his appetites? Knew that.
The President would say anything and hurt anybody to get out of a mess? Knew that.
Married men cheat? Knew that.
Married men cheat with young women? Knew that.
Married men who cheat with young women lie about it? Knew that.
Hillary isn't throwing Bill's stuff out on the White House lawn because she is as committed to their repugnant arrangement as he is? Knew that.
August 23, 1998:
Suddenly, That Woman stamped her feet. Like the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction," Monica Lewinsky issued a chilling ultimatum to the man who jilted her: I will not be ignored.
She let it be known that she was wounded that the President had failed to apologize to her and had dismissed their grand, 18-month romance, their shared passion for books and laughs, as trivial -- a mere mechanism for relieving Oval Office tension.
Mr. Clinton rejected a more contrite version of the speech written by Bob Shrum -- nicknamed the "Shoot Me" draft at the White House -- that contained an apology to "Monica Lewinsky and her family." Instead, with some brass-knuckle guidance from Hillary, he embraced his wife and daughter as "the two people I love most," while swatting Monica away as "inappropriate."
He portrayed himself, insultingly, as a passive participant in their trysts. What she called true love, he called "legally accurate."
September 13, 1998:
The dialogue in this potboiler, compiled with sanctimonious, even voyeuristic relish by Reverend Starr, is so trite and bodice-ripping that it makes "Titanic" look profound.
In fact, Monica identified with Rose, the feisty, zaftig young heroine of "Titanic." Last January, the former intern wrote the President what she called "an embarrassing mushy note" inspired by the movie, asking her former boyfriend if they could have sex (the lying-down kind).
Despite the fact that it takes place in the most powerful spot on the planet, the romance does not sizzle.
Bill Clinton fancies himself another Jack Kennedy and invoked his idol's name last week to defend himself.
But Kennedy was cool. His women were glamorous. The Rat Pack was good copy. He may have been just as immoral, but his carousing at least had style.
Mr. Clinton's escapades are just cheesy and depressing. The sex scenes are flat, repetitive, juvenile and cloying, taking place in the windowless hallway outside the Oval Office study or in the President's bathroom.
November 18, 1998: In the final column, Dowd concluded with this:
New York magazine, which included me among its mug shots, rains a cascade of poll numbers showing that by big margins the public is fed up with hearing about the scandal.
I know exactly how the public feels. I'm sick of hearing about it too.
But the fact is that the scandal is there, and the President did what he did and said what he said, and the consequences of what he did and said have preoccupied the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government for a year.
To pretend otherwise, to submit robotically to the polls, to take one's professional instructions from the wishes and whims of a fickle electorate would be to abdicate the role the public says it wants the press to play: covering the news.
If the President had told the truth immediately, the story would have died. But it is our job to undo the spin and look into the lies and go the extra skeptical mile to see that there is no cover-up. Moreover, all journalists are not like all other journalists in the wild and woolly and recklessly fast era of the 24-hour news cycle of cable, the Internet and high-decibel know-it-alls and gossips.
The impure history of modern America -- Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra -- proves that reporters have a duty to dig for the truth, whatever the public thinks.
There is a danger of making false equations between popularity and rightness, between what is liked and what is true. The danger is that next time, when the cover-up takes place in a less gray area, reporters will look at the numbers and go home early. Next time it may not be about sex and lies. It may be about life and death.
