The New York Times tweeted and deleted an obituary for Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin in order to paint her in a more sympathetic light. After all, she was a terrorist, not a conservative.

The Times’s original tweet correctly noted that she took part in “the murderous 1981 holdup of a Brink’s armored truck.” But that was far too harsh for the left-wing Twitterati, so the Times made a second attempt. Boudin was indeed “imprisoned for her role in a fatal robbery,” but she “later helped former inmates,” so it’s all a wash.

Though the Times’s social media team was appropriately harsh the first time, the whitewashed second attempt better represents the obituary. The piece laments that she was given a harsh sentence though she wasn’t even at the scene where security guard Peter Paige was killed, even though she took part in the planned heist and was at the scene where police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown were murdered. The armed heist was planned and the potential outcomes were clear, and Boudin and all of her terrorist friends who took part bore equal responsibility.

But Boudin “proved to be a model prisoner,” the Times informs us. She may have been a proud member of a terrorist group, saying that “the very status of being underground was an identity for me,” but she also wrote poetry and helped inmates who had AIDS. At the end of the day, we must take the good with the bad and the poetry with the domestic terrorism. Is it any wonder she walked out of prison and into a cushy university job?

This is par for the course for New York Times obituaries. The outlet gave more favorable sendoffs to communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and pornographer Hugh Hefner than it did the president of the Mormon church. The Times was kinder to Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, the biggest mass murderer of the 20th century, than it was to Sam Wyche, the former football coach who committed the high crime of once barring a female reporter from the locker room. The outlet’s obituary for the recently deceased former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was harsher than its obituary for former Sen. Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina segregationist.

The Times makes a habit of using its obituaries to kick dirt in the face of the recently deceased, but only if they had an issue in life that it can tie to a current political or social matter. For others, such as Castro and Mao, their historical impact doesn’t leave any room to note that they destroyed millions of lives. Even in death, Boudin’s life was whitewashed in the name of criminal justice reform, because we must see the soft side of every criminal, even if they were a terrorist.