UPDATE: In an August 13 blog post, New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal praised Maureen Dowd for the “masterful” analysis in her latest column of a recent Hillary Clinton interview. He did not address the criticism of that column.

Maureen Dowd's long descent into anti-Clinton self-parody hit a new low last night when she managed to transition from discussing the death of Robin Williams to an attack on Hillary Clinton.

In her August 12 column following the news that Williams died in an apparent suicide, Dowd opened by recounting an interview she once conducted with the comedian, before abruptly transitioning into an attack on Hillary Clinton (emphasis added):

As our interview ended, I was telling him about my friend Michael Kelly's idea for a 1-900 number, not one to call Asian beauties or Swedish babes, but where you'd have an amorous chat with a repressed Irish woman. Williams delightedly riffed on the caricature, playing the role of an older Irish woman answering the sex line in a brusque brogue, ordering a horny caller to go to the devil with his impure thoughts and disgusting desire.

I couldn't wait to play the tape for Kelly, who doubled over in laughter.

So when I think of Williams, I think of Kelly. And when I think of Kelly, I think of Hillary, because Michael was the first American reporter to die in the Iraq invasion, and Hillary Clinton was one of the 29 Democratic senators who voted to authorize that baloney war.

Dowd's bizarre segue was immediately greeted with widespread ridicule from both conservatives and liberals.

Conservative website Twitchy -- which Media Matters agrees with very seldomly -- asked, “How does that make any sense whatsoever?” The site also highlighted criticism from numerous pundits, including NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who wondered whether “the New York Times is too embarrassed to edit Maureen Dowd anymore”; Bay Area News Group editor Daniel Jimenez, who called the column “stupefyingly embarrassing” and posited that Dowd was “destroying” the Times' brand; and Forbes contributor Tom Watson, who said the Times should “be ashamed.”

Fox News contributor Mary Katharine Ham, writing for conservative site Hot Air, called Dowd's transition from Williams to Clinton “the most graceless, tacky, incoherent segue in recent memory.” Referencing Dowd's ill-fated experiment with edible marijuana, Washington Examiner senior writer Philip Klein wrote, “From now on, I'm just gonna assume that Maureen Dowd writes all her columns from a Denver hotel room.” (Examiner colleague Tim Carney replied, “I literally assumed there was an editing error.”)

Several critics noted Dowd's tendency to turn any news event into an attack on the Clintons. Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf called the piece “as glowing an example of Maureen Dowd's Hillary vendetta as any we've seen yet,” while Mother Jones' Kevin Drum asked, “I wonder if there's anything left in the world that doesn't remind Dowd of Hillary Clinton?”

The answer is no. Dowd's bizarre obsession with Hillary Clinton dates back more than two decades, during which she has attacked the former secretary of state and first lady in at least 141 columns. A Media Matters analysis of Dowd's work since 1993 found that the columnist has repeatedly used popular culture references to attack Clinton, managing to link her to everything from the movie The Stepford Wives to a Picasso painting.