Hillary Rodham Clinton is every inch the conspiracy theorist that Donald Trump is, and she demonstrated that with her recent suggestion that both Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) and progressive third-party presidential candidate Jill Stein are “Russian assets,” part of a scheme in which Moscow and the GOP are tag-teaming Democrats in the 2020 election.

Clinton likes a good conspiracy theory, because it sounds a lot less embarrassing than, “Oops, I forgot about Wisconsin.”

Gabbard, who announced on Friday that she is not seeking reelection to Congress, slammed Clinton, calling her a coward hiding behind “proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media.”

Professional Clinton apologists in the media — who are legion — are now trying to say Clinton’s marks were misrepresented. They weren’t, as the transcript shows: Gabbard and Stein are “both Russian assets” in Clinton’s telling.

Silly stuff. But haven’t Democrats had enough of the Clintons?

Bill and Hillary Clinton are the penicillin-resistant disease of American politics, who have been on the scene since I was in high school. My first vote was against Bill Clinton’s reelection. (If former Libertarian candidate Andre Marrou is wondering: Yeah, I’m the guy who voted for you. You’re welcome.) The Clintons have been around forever, and they show no signs of going away — why?

Bill Clinton was a hero to Democrats in the ’90s because after being flattened by Ronald Reagan, who was reelected in a 49-state landslide (recount Minnesota!), they thought they’d never win again. In 1996, winning was enough for Democrats.

President Bill Clinton’s legacy is, to put it gently, mixed. He’s the Harvey Weinstein of American presidents. Mrs. Clinton’s legacy is not mixed. She was a seat-warming non-entity pretending to represent New York in the Senate, an incompetent secretary of state and a comprehensive failure in presidential politics, losing once to a nobody back-bencher from Illinois and then eight years later to a game-show host from Queens.

She’s a certified loser, and one who is increasingly out of step with where the Democratic Party is today, from economics to foreign policy.

When Lyndon Baines Johnson was sent back to Texas in 1969, he was a broken man. He grew out his hair, let his freak flag fly and then did the honorable thing and quietly died shortly after Richard Nixon was reelected in a 49-state landslide (recount Massachusetts!).

Clinton likes a good conspiracy theory, because it sounds a lot less embarrassing than, ‘Oops, I forgot about Wisconsin.’

But Johnson didn’t go back to Texas alone. He brought with him a small army of former aides and deputies and advisers and hangers-on, a little brigade of Johnsonites and nostalgists who dominated the Democratic Party in Texas, particularly in Austin, for a generation. They were loyal, but they weren’t very effective. And the last time a Democrat won a governor’s election in Texas was 1990.

The Clintons are over, but the shambolic Clinton machine remains. The Democratic Party and the media (to the extent that the two are distinct from one another) are full of Clinton sycophants and enablers (George Stephanopoulos, Paul Begala, John Podesta, etc.), and Gabbard was not wrong to point out that many of them are still eager to do the dirty work of Democrats’ ancien régime.

The party of Tulsi Gabbard has a future. The party of Hillary Clinton has a past.

As a conservative, I’d prefer a Bill Clinton-style Democratic Party to one dominated by the dotty and fanciful thinking of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But that is not where the Democratic Party is today, and it is fair for the younger, more left-leaning activists who represent the Democratic Party today to look at all of this endless Clinton psychodrama and ask: “What’s in it for us?”

The subtle blend of fecklessness and vindictiveness that Mrs. Clinton brings to Democratic politics offers nothing except name recognition.