This blog has a theme today: sitcoms.

The first post is about "And Just Like That" (and mentions "Leave It to Beaver" and "Seinfeld").

The most recent post is about "The Cosby Show."

And the only other post... well, I've got to shoehorn it in, but think about it. Everybody into the Oval Office. Maybe you think that's not funny, but I was raised on "Dr. Strangelove."

"Whether you are touching up the 'Mona Lisa,' 'reviewing' novels or doing logic puzzles" — using A.I. — "you are engaging in the very human drive to play."

"As I’ve watched people adopt these systems, what I’ve seen is mostly people playing with art and language. If you go through the history of these bots, you see poetry, fiction and all kinds of little genre experiments like this as a constantly recurring theme.... OpenAI also advertised one of its early models with an image produced by the prompt 'astronaut riding a horse.' The natural response to this image is to think, 'Cool!'...  We ought to think about A.I. as an entertainment-first system, before anything else. Would you replace all of primary education with 'Sesame Street'? Or decide government policy with SimCity? It’s not an insult to the beloved children’s program or computer game to say no. The lesson is simple: We might be taking A.I. too seriously."

Writes Leif Weatherby, director of the NYU Digital Theory Lab, in "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Fun With A.I" (NYT).

I like the name Leif Weatherby, and he probably didn't write his own headline, but its reference point — "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" — is a movie that ends with the destruction of all of humanity. So are we taking A.I. too seriously or not seriously enough?

One might interpret the movie title to mean the bomb is going to destroy us all before long so there's no use worrying. It's the world we're stuck in, so love the reality that exists. It's the old: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die.

Is that Dr. Weatherby's point?

***

Grok, what's the origin and history of the adage Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die?

The phrase draws heavily from two passages in the Bible: 

Ecclesiastes 8:15 (Old Testament, c. 3rd–2nd century BCE): In the King James Version, it reads, "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry." This verse, attributed to King Solomon, reflects on the futility of life and the value of enjoying simple pleasures amidst its uncertainties. 

Isaiah 22:13 (Old Testament, c. 8th century BCE): This passage states, "Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die." It appears in a context of rebuke, where the people of Jerusalem are criticized for indulging in revelry instead of repenting during a time of crisis.

"[Trump] is fighting for the fundamental idea that this country belongs... not to the radical left Communists...."

"We are going to have to be on top of it every single day focused every single day, driving forward every single day with unrelenting focus and passion because God gave us this country our founding fathers fought and died for this country, generations of Americans have sacrificed and bled for this country and we are not going to let the radical left — the Communists — and the American haters take our country. It's not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. So I ask you all to send a message right now to all the bureaucrats, to all the radical left commies, to the criminal aliens... to everyone who threatens the future of this country...."

Stephen Miller — at CPAC yesterday — called America's left wing "communists" and even "commies."

I think this is the only serious current use of the word "commie" that I've recorded in this blog. I've quoted a couple comic deployments of the word — here and here.

And I quoted Rush Limbaugh describing the "Dr. Strangelove" character Buck Turgidson: He just loves war and hates the Russians, hates the commies."

And I've got John Wayne in a Playboy interview — back in 1971: 

"I'm looking for famous quotes that express the idea that the person who controls X controls Y."

That's how I prompted Grok just now. I was inspired by something Kakistocracy wrote in the comments in last night's café:

It’s weird to think that Musk will end up having paid far less for the United States Government than he did for Twitter.* To be fair -- what he paid for twitter was kinda the down payment for the presidency. It was a package deal. He needed both.

Here are the quotes Grok fished up for me: 

• "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." This quote from George Orwell's "1984" emphasizes how control over information (history) leads to control over future outcomes.

• "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws." Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, this quote suggests that control over a nation's monetary system equates to control over its governance.

• "He who controls the media, controls the mind." This is a variation on a quote by Jim Morrison, highlighting how control over information dissemination (media) can shape public perception and behavior.

• "Control the money, you control countries. Control the food, you control the world." A quote often attributed to Henry Kissinger illustrates the power of controlling essential resources like finance and food to influence global or national control.

I'd like to have those 4 over to dinner at the same time. We could talk about controlling things. Who would control the conversation, hmmm? I say Orwell. 

Anyway, Grok and I — at my prompting — proceeded to talk about the ancient Archimedes quote "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." (It's different from those other 4 quotes, but not completely different.) And then I fed Kakistocracy's quote to Grok thusly: 

"Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?"

Said Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, quoted in "The Anti-Fluoride Movement Vaults Into the Mainstream/With the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, a formerly fringe opinion suddenly gets wide attention" (NYT)(free-access link).

Trump's convention speech had 2 phases, both brilliant, but very different.

In the first phase, Trump describes the assassination attempt from his perspective and for what he asserts is the last time:

So many people have asked me what happened. “Tell us what happened, please.” And therefore, I will tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s actually too painful to tell. It was a warm, beautiful day in the early evening....

This fills 20 minutes and segues into an unrushed tribute to the man who died and the 2 other men who were injured. There's an iconic stage prop, Corey Comperatore represented in the form of his empty helmet and jacket. Trump kisses Comperatore's head and pats him on the shoulder then returns to the lectern to lead a silent prayer. Again unrushed (but not overlong). We see different members of the audience in different attitudes of prayer. (Jared Kushner, eyes wide open, looked straight ahead.) 

The first phase continued with the uplifting abstract material that Trump had promised to deliver. I've copied this section in full:

I'm getting a "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" vibe from this NYT headline.

"How Democrats Learned to Cast Aside Reservations and Embrace Biden 2024." 

I wish I had the skills to make a parody of this poster: 

   

Looking for that image, I stumbled across the wonderful Spanish and French posters for "Dr. Strangelove":

Have you stopped worrying about the bomb? I mean, have you cast aside reservations about the bomb? (And learned to love Joe Biden?)

"Seriously, you are the first person who seems to have noticed the sexual framework from intromission to last spasm," wrote Stanley Kubrick...

... to LeGrace Benson, a Cornell art history professor, who had written him a letter in 1964 detailing her observations about "Dr. Strangelove."

Now, Benson, who is 92, is interviewed in "My Coffee With Stanley Kubrick" (NY Magazine).

"[A]n 1885 anti-vaccine banner that read 'Pure blood and no adulteration'; and activists who asserted that vaccination was 'pollution of our veins.'..."

"The association of 'pure,' 'natural' and 'good' would have made perfect sense at the time, since natural goodness and unnatural evil were standard in popular discussions of health. In his immensely popular 1867 book 'The Philosophy of Eating,' homeopath Albert J. Bellows blamed all illness on impurity and in a chapter titled 'Impure Blood' explained how good health depended on 'natural food' and 'pure water.' Illness was the result of 'unnatural drugs or medicine.' The same associations remained powerful in the mid-20th century, when opponents of water fluoridation complained about unnatural adulteration of what should be pure. Their position — described by social scientists at the time as 'naturalist syndrome' — was so mainstream that Stanley Kubrick skewered it in his classic 'Dr. Strangelove,' wherein the lunatic Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper bemoans how fluoride corrupts the 'pure blood of pure Americans.'"

 From "How the phrase ‘natural immunity’ misleads us about real risks and dangers/Antibodies to the coronavirus are not better just because they are ‘natural'" (WaPo, September 29, 2021). 

That's written by Alan Levinovitz, an associate professor of religious studies at James Madison University and the author of "Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science."

"Has political satire lost its power? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody?"

That's from the intro to "Why Are People So Mad About Don’t Look Up? Climate change is a tough subject for any film, let alone a satire."

It's a podcast — audio and transcript at the link — with various Atlantic staff people (Kevin Townsend, Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber). I have seen the movie, by the way.

I think the quote I put in the post title is trite and foolish. The difference between the present and the past is the present is where you're living now. It's self-involved to believe that in the past, you could do parody and satire, but now — now! — things are already so absurd that there's nothing to add, no way to exaggerate, and we're suffering in some extreme new way that makes comedy impossible.

But let's see what these people have to say:

"[A]t a virtual gathering of the National Guard Association of the United States, a group he addressed while speaking against a backdrop of American flags, with a flag pin affixed to his suit lapel," Biden asserted "I’ll never use the military as a prop."

"I promise you, as president, I’ll never put you in the middle of politics, or personal vendettas. I’ll never use the military as a prop or as a private militia to violate rights of fellow citizens. That’s not law and order. You don’t deserve that."

Quoted in "Biden, Speaking to National Guard Group, Takes Aim at Republican Criticism on Crime/The Democratic presidential nominee hit back at attacks delivered at the Republican National Convention" (NYT).

Some day, I hope there will be movies on big screens with an audience full of living breathing human beings. I hope to sit amongst the fortunate people of the future one day. I hope to gaze upon a dramatization of the 2020 campaign for President of the United States. I hope the scene described is in the movie, and the line is used verbatim. I see us all laughing quite heartily.

What a line! It's almost on the level of "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"



Using the military as a prop, Joe Biden said "I’ll never use the military as a prop." That's rich.

In the middle of politics, Biden promised this military group, "I’ll never put you in the middle of politics."

Expressing his personal vendetta against President Trump, Biden told the group "I’ll never put you in the middle of... personal vendettas."

"You don’t deserve that," he observed, giving them exactly what he's saying they don't deserve.

"I tried to watch but kept switching to 'Dr. Strangelove' on Turner Movie Channel. Much better acting and the plot was far more hopeful."

Writes Owen in the comments to this morning's post, "Mini Mike Bloomberg’s debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates, and there have been some really bad ones."

Angela Merkel shakes disturbingly during the German national anthem.

You see her here standing next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on a hot day in Berlin:

Afterwards, she said "Since then I have drunk at least three glasses of water – I obviously needed that and so I'm doing very well now."

The Mayo Clinic website does not list shaking as a symptom of dehydration.

About that German national anthem (from Wikipedia):

The song is also well known by the beginning and refrain of the first stanza, "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles"... but this has never been its title. The line "Germany, Germany above all" originally meant that the most important goal of 19th-century German liberal revolutionaries should be a unified Germany which would overcome loyalties to the local kingdoms, principalities, duchies and palatines (Kleinstaaterei) of then-fragmented Germany.

The melody of the "Deutschlandlied" was written by Joseph Haydn in 1797 to provide music to the poem "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" (English: "God save Franz the Emperor") by Lorenz Leopold Haschka... Haydn's work is sometimes called the "Emperor's Hymn". It is often used as the musical basis for the hymnal "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken".

Losing physical control during the German national anthem got me thinking about the last scene in "Dr. Strangelove."

That said, I hope Angela is doing fine, I think Haydn wrote a beautiful song, and I have participated in the singing of "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken" many times.

"McDonald's has made the decision to stop selling milkshakes when there's a Brexit rally nearby... Burger King U.K. came under fire after tweeting, 'Dear people of Scotland. We're selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun.'"

From "Throwing milkshakes as a political statement makes a splash in Britain" (CBS News).

Is the entire cup thrown at the person or just the contents? I'm not sure, but this "milkshaking" seems to be the same activity as pie-throwing (where, usually, it's shaving cream in a pie tin, smashed into a person's face). I guess for milkshaking you don't need to get as close, and it's easy to buy your loaded weapon in a fast-food joint. In the UK, there's debate about whether this should actually be called "violence," but obviously it is.

Wikipedia has an entry for "milkshaking":

Milkshaking is a term that refers to the use of milkshakes and other drinks as a means of political protest in a manner similar to egging.

Well, with egging, the hard shell is always part of the projectile, and you've got to hit hard enough to break the egg.

The target of a milkshaking is usually covered in a milkshake that is thrown from a cup or bottle.

Usually... so perhaps sometimes the cup is also thrown.

The trend gained popularity in the United Kingdom in May 2019 during the European Parliament election and was used primarily against right-wing and far-right politicians and activists, such as Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, Carl Benjamin, and members of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party.

Robinson was the first one to be milkshaked, and when he got milkshaked the next day, he punched the person who did it.

In American slang, "milkshake," used as a noun, refers to a woman's body "and the way she carries it." Urban Dictionary has various entries for "milkshake," the verb, going back to 2005, including the idea of throwing a milkshake at someone, from 2013. That doesn't have the political-theater angle, just a mindless prank, done from a moving car, aimed at a random pedestrian. The British activity is also there, entered 2 days ago.

And here's the rather extensive Wikipedia article on pie throwing. Excerpt:

The probable originator of pieing as a political act was Thomas King Forcade, the founder of High Times magazine. In 1970, Forcade pied Otto N. Larsen, the Chairman of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography; his action was called the first Yippie pieing[.] Aron Kay, also a Yippie, went on to take up Forcade's pieing tactics. Kay pied, among many others, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and Andy Warhol....

Though pieing may not have been a political protest before 1970, pieing appeared — almost appeared — in the great 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove," and the context was distinctly political:

But for a last-minute change of Kubrick’s heart, the moment of reckoning was to be preceded with a riotous battle with pastries from the War Room buffet table. The fight, which was shot but cut out before the final print, begins with Soviet Ambassador de Sadeski (Peter Bull) responding to the threat of a strip search by hurling a custard pie at US general Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), which misses and hits the American president.

“Gentlemen,” rallies Turgidson, holding his wounded leader (Peter Sellers) in his arms, “our beloved president has been infamously struck down by a pie in the prime of his life! Are we going to let that happen? Massive retaliation!” Chaos ensues in fast-motion, in a manner recalling the silent slapstick of Mack Sennett and the Keystone Cops....

"Eventually, Strangelove fires off a gun and shouts ‘Ve must stop zis childish game! Zere is Verk to do!’ The other characters sit around on the floor and play with custard cream like children building sandcastles. ‘I think their minds must have snepped from the strain,’ Strangelove announces."

Pie throwing goes way back — to stage shows and silent movies. The first is the 1909 film "Mr. Flip." There are many many pie-in-face bits in the movies but (judging from the Wikipedia article) the ultimate was this 2-minute sequence from "The Battle of the Century" (1927) with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy:



Stop! Stop! This has gone far enough! Love thy neighbor!

"Frisch’s former students describe him as eccentric, nerdy, prone to lengthy classroom digressions about his stamp collection, dinosaurs or childhood snow days spent sledding."

"Any teacher who spends three decades in the classroom, speaking extemporaneously for hours on end to a roomful of teenagers, is going to have awkward moments. [Ben] Frisch might have had more of them, and they may have been a bit more awkward. But that was how he connected, and it was perhaps a way of connecting that is no longer possible. 'Everybody knew this guy was off — weird behavior, quirky,' said one parent who, fearing retribution against her child, insisted on anonymity. 'Maybe in the ’70s that would have been O.K., but not when you’re paying $45,000 a year in tuition.'"

From "A Teacher Made a Hitler Joke in the Classroom/It Tore the School Apart" (NYT). The joke was saying "Heil Hitler" after he noticed that his arm — in teaching a pre-calculus lesson involving angles — was in the Hitler salute position. "Frisch is a practicing Quaker, but his father was Jewish, and two of his great-grandmothers were killed at Auschwitz."

[Bo] Lauder [the principal at Friends Seminary] did not consider the “Heil Hitler” episode a close call. “Personally, I was appalled,” he told me. “I couldn’t imagine, even as a joke — and I grew up watching ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ — that in a class that had nothing to do with history or World War II or Nazism or teaching German language that an incident like that could happen.” I asked Lauder why he felt he needed to go so far as to fire Frisch. “One of our pledges is to make all of our students feel safe,” he replied. “And that is something that I take very, very seriously.”

That no one has accused Frisch of being an anti-Semite was beside the point: His invocation of the Nazi salute in a classroom full of high school students, regardless of his intentions, was enough to end his career. On today’s campus, words and symbols can be seen as a form of violence; to many people, engaging in a public debate about the nuances of their power is to tolerate their use. “I asked one of our lawyers, ‘How can I do this in a more Quakerly way?’ ” Lauder told me. “And he just looked at me and stated the obvious: There is no way to make a firing a Quakerly event.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Isn't it making fun of the salute rather than promoting it?

Yes, but it's the Era of That's Not Funny, because how is a student ever able to be sure that the device of making a joke is not really a way to say the otherwise forbidden thing? I mean, what if a lot of students started greeting one another in the hallways of Friends Seminary with a big old Nazi salute and a hearty "Heil Hitler!" Would it be hilarious? Would it roundly make a mockery of Nazis?

You know what it would be?, I suddenly realize. It would be a real "I am Spartacus" moment! If all the students who think Mr. Frisch is getting an unfair punishment would greet each other henceforth with a Nazi salute and a hearty "Heil Hitler!" — what a protest that would be!

Here's the Wikipedia article on the Nazi salute, which I looked up because I wanted to see the extent of efforts to drain it of power by turning it into a big joke. I thought there'd be a substantial list under the "In popular culture" heading, but there are only 3 things, one of which is "Hogan's Heroes," the 1965-1971 TV show that the Friend's Seminary principal says he "grew up" watching:

• In a running gag in Hogan's Heroes, Colonel Klink often forgets to give the Hitler salute at the end of a phone call; instead, he usually asks, "What's that?" and then says, "Yes, of course, Heil Hitler." In the German language version of the show, called Ein Käfig Voller Helden (A Cage Full of Heroes), "Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz have rural Gomer Pyle-type accents," and "stiff-armed salutes are accompanied by such witticisms as "this is how high the cornflowers grow." The "Heil Hitler" greeting was the variant most often used and associated with the series; "Sieg Heil" was rarely heard.

• On August 11, 2017, Jeffrey Lord was fired by CNN for tweeting "Sieg Heil!" 

He was joking.

• A similar gesture was used by the fictional Nazi-affiliated organization Hydra, with both arms outstretched and the phrase "Hail Hydra" uttered by members of the organization.

There must be more pop culture examples. I can think of "Dr. Strangelove":



AND: Of course, there's "The Producers" ("Springtime for Hitler" is loaded with Nazi salutes):



ALSO: I know that's the more recent, more musical version of "The Producers." I thought the clip was excellent and used it, even though I'd gone searching for in the original 1967 movie, which you can see here. In that movie, Dick Shawn played the ridiculous Lorenzo St. DuBois (L.S.D.) who was intentionally miscast as Hitler in the so-bad-it's-good show "Springtime for Hitler." I love Dick Shawn in that movie, and went to read his IMDB page, and was fascinated by this:

Shawn won a huge fan base... touring in one-man stage shows which contained a weird mix of songs, sketches, satire, philosophy and even pantomime. A bright, innovative wit, one of his best touring shows was called "The Second Greatest Entertainer in the World." During the show's intermission, Shawn would lie visibly on the stage floor absolutely still during the entire time. By freakish coincidence, Shawn was performing at the University of California at San Diego in 1987 when he suddenly fell forward on the stage during one of his spiels about the Holocaust. The audience, of course, laughed, thinking it was just a part of his odd shtick. In actuality, the 63-year-old married actor with four children had suffered a fatal heart attack.

What an ending!

AND: Here's Dick Shawn on Johnny Carson in 1986, doing a comedy routine about how you can't do jokes anymore, because everything is dangerous:



It was already the Era of That's Not Funny as far as he was concerned.

"The New ‘Heathers’ Is a Trumpian, LGBT-Bashing Nightmare."

Samantha Allen at The Daily Beast reviews the new TV show based on the great 80s movie about high school outsiders who murder the mean popular kids.

The television reboot of Heathers opens with a guidance counselor asking the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Veronica whether or not she is “a hermaphrodite”—the implication being that even though she has a 4.2 GPA and a high SAT score, Veronica needs some sort of marginalized identity to get accepted anywhere other than her safety school....

If you believe that kids these days are fragile “snowflakes,” that political correctness is running amok, and that LGBT people are now society’s true bullies, this new Heathers is the show for you. The premiere of the rebooted cult classic, now airing for free online, takes place in a universe—clearly a fictional one—where the football team is oppressed and yesteryear’s fat, queer, and black victims now rule the school with manicured fists. The show feels like it was written for aging Fox News viewers who get angry about people’s gender pronouns—which is odd because it’s clearly being marketed to a young and therefore progressive-leaning audience who may not remember the 1988 original.....

The new Heathers is for people who want to see a heteronormative status quo restored before it has even been meaningfully disrupted. (“You know, what if the next truly revolutionary thing was just to be totally normal?” Veronica asks.)

I added the link for watching it free, but do you want to watch it? I'm kind of interested in the turnabout, if it could be done with real intelligence and sharp writing. And I love the original movie. I watched it many times... before Columbine. Once outsider kids killing their schoolmates started happening in real life, the satire lost its fun and its edge. Who wants to laugh at schoolkids killing schoolkids now? Fortunately, I can still enjoy "Dr. Strangelove."

You can't fight in here. This is the Empathy Tent!

At Berkeley, fights break out in the "empathy tent." "The empathy tent was reportedly in place to offer protesters a calm place to unwind amid the choas around them," the NY Post reports.

Trump-Pence post-coital...

... logo.

That's the first time I've seen fit to use the word "post-coital" on this blog, though it did appear — once — in a quote:

"I realised one day, as I gazed out on the treetops outside the bedroom of our little cottage, that the usual post-coital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive, was no longer following the physical pleasure.... I felt I was losing somehow, what made me a woman, and that I could not face living in this condition for the rest of my life."

Recognize the distinctive authorial voice? It's Naomi Wolf.

That post ends — aptly! — with this:



"Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed [the physical act of love]. Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly."

Here's the Wikipedia article, "Post-coital tristesse":

Post-coital tristesse (PCT) or post-coital dysphoria (PCD) is the feeling in humans of melancholy, anxiety, agitation or aggression after sexual intercourse (coitus). Its name comes from New Latin postcoitalis and French tristesse, literally "sadness". Many people with PCT may exhibit strong feelings of anxiety lasting from five minutes to two hours after coitus.

The phenomenon is traced to the [ancient] Greek doctor Galen, who wrote, "Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster." The philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione writes "For as far as sensual pleasure is concerned, the mind is so caught up in it, as if at peace in a [true] good, that it is quite prevented from thinking of anything else. But after the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is past, the greatest sadness follows. If this does not completely engross, still it thoroughly confuses and dulls the mind."...

We'll see how Trump and Pence do. 

I wondered why Megyn Kelly didn't probe into what Trump saw in "Citizen Kane" and "All Quiet on the Western Front."

She asked what was his favorite movie and his favorite book and never stopped to ask why. I wanted to know more. A reader sent me this, footage from an Errol Morris project that became a short at the 2002 Oscars. Various celebrities talked about film. Trump's material didn't make the final cut, but he talks quite a bit about "Citizen Kane":



He says a rich man can be unhappy — even more unhappy than his wife — because wealth can distance you and insulate you from other people. He also says the right word matters — that "Kane" wouldn't be the same without that word "rosebud." He does not take what I hear as a prod to talk about the oft-discussed sexual connotation of "rosebud."

Here's a 2002 New Yorker article about the Errol Morris project, with this about Trump:

"And who is Huma married to? One of the great sleazebags of our time, Anthony Weiner."

Said Donald Trump, who then did typing-on-a-cell-phone finger gestures while mouthing "I love you very much."

Trump noted that he "knew him before they caught him with the —" he trailed off, again mimicking typing on a phone. "And he was a bad guy then; it turns out that he was a really bad guy," he added.

“So Huma is getting classified secrets,” Trump said. “She’s married to Anthony Wiener, who’s a perv. No, he is! Do you think there’s even a five percent chance that she’s not telling Anthony Weiner … what the hell is coming across?"

The response from the Hillary campaign — not Hillary herself, some spokesguy — was: "There’s no place for patently false, personal attacks towards a staff member" and Trump "should be ashamed of himself."

What's the "patently false" part? Trump didn't call Weiner the greatest sleazebag of our time, only "one of the great sleazebags of our time." Perhaps Weiner isn't a "great sleazebag," but it's the kind of opinion that can't be called "patently false."

Is it "perv"? Does the Hillary campaign want us to contemplate whether Weiner is a "perv"? What exactly does "perv" mean and does that apply to Weiner?

"Do you think there’s even a five percent chance that she’s not telling Anthony Weiner?" is a question. There's a way to argue that you can't immunize yourself from the accusation of slander by putting your assertions in the form of a question, but this is not a defamation lawsuit. This is political rhetoric, and the Clinton campaign is saying this is patently false. That's weak.

Is the patently false part "Huma is getting classified secrets"? But that's not a personal attack. There's no shame in probing into how Hillary handled classified material and whether the people she's trusted are trustworthy.



ADDED: Here's the video. I note that he does answer that "five percent" question: "I don't think so."