One of the enjoyable subplots in Christopher Buckley’s book “Boomsday” is what essentially is a Google zapper — a device that eliminates bad, harmful, or embarrassing links on Google.

I was reminded of that all-too-real fictional tool when reading this in Howard Kurtz’s piece today about how the media embarrassed itself in New Hampshire:

“Look at this cycle,” says CBS correspondent Jeff Greenfield. “McCain front-runner, McCain dead, McCain is back. Hillary inevitable, Hillary toast, Hillary is back. There is no defense for this. It is built into our DNA.”

Greenfield fell into the trap with a Slate piece Tuesday on how Clinton and other candidates could recover from early losses, leading to a hastily added postscript: “OK, Hillary won tonight. Oh, waiter, two orders of crow, please. This is what happens when you ignore your own advice to let the people vote first.”

Wait a minute — Greenfield added a postscript?  He edited history?  Um, you can’t do that, can you?

Rather than backdating edits to history — always a dicey endeavor for professional journalists — here’s a different idea.  Why not just dive into Google and Nexis and simply, like Buckley might have them, eliminate the entire body of reporting and analysis about the presidential race for the two years leading up to Iowa and New Hampshire?  I mean, all that impressive expertise is essentially inoperative right now, right?  Heck, more than inoperative — it was all a waste of time.   All that reporting, all those polls, all that pricey punditry didn’t amount to, as Bogart would have said, a hill of beans.  (I know, I know — but this is our hill, and these are our beans.  But still!)

“Dallas” did this effectively a few decades back — eliminating an easier year of the TV show by saying something like it was all a bad dream.  We feel the same way after two years of presidential campaign reporting.  Just erase it all.

Then we can proudly quote Bob Newhart from the series finale of “Newhart” when he awakens next to Suzanne Pleshette and says: “Honey, you won’t believe the dream I just had.”