"The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy."

"The Iranians are clearly negotiating skilfully or very skilfully not negotiating... a whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership."

Said Chancellor Friedrich Merz, quoted in "Is German troop withdrawal start of US uncoupling from Europe? After President Trump took offence at Friedrich Merz’s Iran war comments, Donald Tusk warned that infighting was a bigger threat to Nato than its external enemies" (London Times).

Not a typo for "Donald Trump." There really is a Donald Tusk in this story. He's the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. His mild-mannered contribution to the debate is: "The greatest threat to the transatlantic community is not its external enemies, but the ongoing disintegration of our alliance."

Last paragraph of the article:

Which CEO did the better job of humiliating himself in the theater of corporate enthusiasm?

🚨 BREAKING: Anthropic CEO just did a complete 180 in live interview

Do you regret saying ‘dictator-style praise’ about President Trump?

Anthropic CEO:
>“I want to completely apologize for this memo”
>“it was among the most disorienting times in Anthropic’s history”
>“i… pic.twitter.com/MTodBFhebU

— NIK (@ns123abc) March 6, 2026

"In his satirical 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'... Flaubert offered up a range of definitions embodying the stupid notions that silly people too readily accept."

"...  'Art': 'Leads to poorhouse. What use is it, since machines can do things better and quicker?' ... 'Bird': 'Wish you were one, saying with a sigh: "Oh, for a pair of wings!" This shows you have a poetic soul.'... By mocking these thoughts, we push ourselves past them. From this perspective, our sense that we’re getting stupider may simply reflect our determination to be smart."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Are We Getting Stupider? Stupidity is eternal—and more complex than we think" (The New Yorker).

"Dictionary of Received Ideas' — link goes to full text — is one of the few books that has its own tag on this blog: here. It's long been one of my favorite books, and you may have noticed my various proposals for entries in a new Dictionary of Received Ideas. If you get Flaubert's idea, maybe you can help me write this volume for my shelf of Unwritten Books. 

Actually I don't think Rothman conveys Flaubert's idea accurately. Here's a new New Yorker piece from 2013 (by Teju Cole), which explains the "Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues" like this:  "What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight."

Anyway, what's Rothman's point about our possibly becoming stupider? He writes: 

"Nobody got angry. You were angry at people that didn't want to get vaccinated and you didn't get angry at the person who used science..."

"... to create a horrible disease that was completely avoidable. And that killed who knows how many people. That didn't make you mad."

Said Joe Rogan, on his recent podcast with Adam Carolla.

Carolla: "Where's the anger over finding out that it was made in China at a lab... and then where's the anger over being forced or being vaxxed or all this misinformation being used?... I realized they don't want to say anything 'cause they're ashamed

Profound and multidimensional disrespect.

It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring "marginalized communities" by making a beautiful historical building really ugly. https://t.co/j7GEtCFsMY

— JD Vance (@JDVance) October 10, 2025

One of the comments over there: "I haven't seen a single person yet mention that this isn't real graffiti. These are carefully pasted vinyl stickers that will be taken off in a couple months when the exhibition ends. They obviously didn't permanently deface a sacred building."

Good thing they were carefully pasted. They could have been carelessly pasted. And it could have been real spray paint. It's hard to imagine any religion but Christianity inviting and celebrating this kind of humiliation. 

Glorying in the humiliation of others — it's not an endearing trait.

LAWFARE: AOC admits the Democrat’s Lawfare against Trump is like an electronic ankle monitor limiting his ability to campaign. Shhh AOC you’re not supposed to admit that part. pic.twitter.com/gvtfulOrCQ

— @amuse (@amuse) May 22, 2024

"Is it possible that the prosecution thinks this works as a way to humiliate Trump?"

I wrote at the end of the last post, which is puzzling over why the prosecution has called Stormy Daniels to the witness stand. The desire to humiliate others is a very low form of self-gratification. It's a big theme in porn — or so I've read — but I won't further expound on the parallels between porn and politics.

I'm just starting a new post on this theme because the very next thing I read was a display of the desire to humiliate Trump. It's Jennifer Rubin, at The Washington Post, in "The New York trial is wearing down Trump — and it shows/His nodding off in court is a sign that he is weaker and more vulnerable than ever":

The trial is aggravating Trump’s lifelong fear of humiliation and his insistence on being the toughest bully on the block.... Any objective observer would acknowledge that things have not been going his way, to put it mildly....

"The dramatic decision to call Ms. Daniels to the stand would carry both possible benefits and definite risks for prosecutors...."

"Her presence would let Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers attack Ms. Daniels as an extortionist.... Ms. Daniels could also offer context about the environment in which she sold her story of their 2006 encounter, which Mr. Trump denies. She was shopping the story as Mr. Trump’s campaign was reeling in 2016 from the disclosure of a recording on the set of Access Hollywood in which he bragged of groping women. Michael Bachner, a New York City defense lawyer not involved in the case, said that if prosecutors did not call Ms. Daniels to testify, 'it would just be a glaring hole' that the defense would question.... Mr. Trump’s lawyers contend that he did not know that the checks he signed for Mr. Cohen were not for legal fees, and that Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump’s employees were responsible for any false records. They would be likely to portray Ms. Daniels as someone whose only real connection to Mr. Trump was wanting to be a possible contestant on his reality show...."

From "Stormy Daniels, Once Paid to Keep Quiet, Could Testify Against Trump/Ms. Daniels could take the stand this week, allowing jurors to see and hear from the person at the center of the criminal case against the former president" (NYT).

I would think the prosecutors want to avoid calling her:

"[Kanye] West, who was with her, donned his favorite all-black getup featuring a loosely fitted unhemmed T-shirt, slouchy pants, a cloth covering his head and face, and socks — with no shoes."

I'm reading "Bianca Censori keeps breasts covered with pillow as she steps out in another sheer outfit" (NY Post)(Kanye West’s 'wife' Bianca Censori stepped out in yet another sheer outfit — this one, accessorized with a couch cushion").

I'm blogging this to help you keep up with the latest news in fashion and humiliation.

"Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella recommends that Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) turn to pornography ..."

"... should she lose the down-to-wire Colorado House race against Adam Frisch. Bardella made the suggestion on set with MSNBC host Joy Reid, who responded with a blaring cackle. 'What’s the meaning if Lauren Boebert, the second most popular QAnon congressperson in MAGA, what if she loses?' Reid asked 'I guess there might be a gain for OnlyFans if [Boebert loses],' Bardella responded.... Bardella followed in line with frequent MSNBC guest Elie Mystal, the goofy-looking man who uses racial slurs to refer to Hershel Walker. On Wednesday, Mystal tweeted the following message before quickly deleting it: 'Is… Lauren Boebert still losing? I guess this is the lucky day of the next OnlyFans star Ted Cruz thinks should be a Congressperson.'" 

From "Joy Reid Blasts Her Cackle [When] Sexist Guest Tells Rep. Lauren Boebert to Join OnlyFans" (Outkick). (I found that via this tweet from Glenn Greenwald.)

MSNBC's @JoyAnnReid: "What job will Lauren Boebert have if she loses?"@kurtbardella: "I guess it might be a gain for OnlyFans" pic.twitter.com/fVf5QZG6xa

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 10, 2022

According to Yahoo!entertainment — entertainment? — "DNC Adviser Apologizes For Suggesting Lauren Boebert's Next Job Should Be OnlyFans." But let's take a look at the text and context of that apology.

"... Ivanka. Always Ivanka. She stood tall on her stilettos. She rose, golden-haired, above the group."

"She was dressed in black cropped pants and blazer. She was toting a very large white handbag and later was wearing a matching face mask with tiny metallic stars.... and White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany... was in a closefitting double-breasted blazer with gold metallic buttons and skinny trousers. She was perched atop a pair of stiletto pumps — a style of footwear that this White House, all on its own, may be keeping in circulation."

From Robin Givhan's fashion-and-politics account of Trump's Bible-laden procession to St. John's Episcopal Church.

It wasn't a terribly far walk...



... but I was struck that the women had to — or chose to — wear stilettos. It made me think of those traditions of crawling to church — deliberately taking on pain and suffering as you make your way to the sacred destination. There are similarities and differences...



The look is not meant to say I am suffering. The idea is to walk fluidly alongside the men as if it's completely natural and perfectly comfortable. There's no visible expression of humility or sacrifice. If anything, the expression is of pride in the prettiness, the extra height, and the complete hiding of any difficulty.

So, it's a bit like a hair shirt, which is a hidden item of clothing that inflicts suffering and is worn as penitence. And yet the stilettos are not worn in secret. They are quite conspicuous and that is the point. And the suffering is merely endured, not undertaken for a higher purpose.

Have stilettos gone out of fashion? Robin Givhan — whose work requires her to keep up with fashion — calls them a "style of footwear that this White House, all on its own, may be keeping in circulation." That has to mean they are passé. Maybe it's like the way right-wing women in the 1960s continued to wear teased, sprayed bouffant hairdos long after other women had moved on to what was called "the natural look."

"Instead of angry politics, we got something more interesting — 90 minutes of Mr. Keillor's muted Minnesota Zen, a comedic art form, contiguous to religion, that he invented a long time ago...."

"... At the microphone, he is the opposite of a 'man of ego, hubris and entitlement.'... Some 35 miles east-northeast of here, in Northampton, Jonathan Edwards preached his fierce sermon, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,' during the First Great Awakening. In the midst of America's Fifth Great Awakening, the Awakening of the Woke, here sat Garrison Keillor, a sinner, bearing witness, though slyly. He paid a steep price for his sins, whatever they were. He said it didn't matter -- it was 'injustice on behalf of a good cause.' The 'good cause' was #MeToo. 'The way you change behavior,' he said, is through fear -- the same point that Jonathan Edwards made. It 'is to whack prominent men with a two-by-four.'"

Writes Lance Morrow in The Wall Street Journal, about Garrison Keillor's appearance at the Meeting House in New Marlborough, Massachusetts (where he was interviewed by Simon Winchester).

Does Morrow take Keillor's remarks at face value? I wish I'd been there and able to look him in the eye and hear the sound — the famous sound — of his voice. He is a humorist. I wouldn't take at face value the notion that the way to change behavior is through fear and that it's fine to whack prominent men with a two-by-four for a good cause. I'm going to take Morrow's "but slyly" to mean that he took it all as satire, even the choice of setting, the New Marlborough Meeting House, which looks like this:



Come on. That's comedy!

Self-cancellation... when apologies are not enough.

View this post on Instagram

I’m going to go away for awhile. But before I do I want to apologize again, and to say clearly that all of this has been my own fault. I am the one who released the book without showing it to the people I wrote about. I’m the one who posted defensively and arrogantly. I’m the one who behaved inconsiderately and disrespectfully, both in 2019 and in 1999. There is obviously no one else to blame but me. Thank you, and I’m sorry. Moby

A post shared by moby xⓋx (@moby) on May 28, 2019 at 8:52am PDT

It's in his self-interest at this point though, isn't it? And he's not committing suicide or — say — resigning from a Senate seat like Al Franken. He has the power to come back when it suits his interests. This is his best hope to get people to buy his book, better at this point than going around telling people buy my book (with some whining about how he's apologized). It's better for him to lie low. Yes, there's something horribly beta about it. Moby is mopey. But I'm guessing that fits his overall self-presentation, so it just might work.

The book is called "Then It Fell Apart." It's all so poetic.

IN THE COMMENTS: William said:

I myself am a beta male, and I'd just like to express my thanks to Moby for showing the way. Truly inspiring leadership. He didn't back down. He backed out...... It's not often a guy who looks like Moby ends up on a bed with a girl who looks like Portman. When such things happen, it's important for all of us to know that such a rare and welcome event has come to pass. Now, you Gods, stand up for betas.....I think Moby could put even a little more spin on the passive aggressive fists of fury by explicitly denying that he and Natalie ever had any kind of physical relationship.

The NYT is very gentle with Naomi Wolf — the "prominent author" who was humiliated in an on-air interview.

I'm reading "After an On-Air Correction, Naomi Wolf Addresses Errors in Her New Book" in the NYT. During a BBC interview, Wolf got the humiliating news that the term "death recorded" did not mean what she assumed, that a death penalty was carried out, but the complete opposite, that the judge determined that the person should not be executed.

I see that a spokeswoman for the U.S. publisher of the book — “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love" — is saying there was an "unfortunate error" but "we believe the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds."

How can the publisher say "the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds"? Or, to be precise, they still "believe" it holds? The only way I can make sense of that is to perceive Houghton Mifflin Harcourt not a publisher of works of history, but in the business of ideology and propaganda, where the believing is all that really matters. Of course, the "overall thesis" survives. In ideology and propaganda, your overall thesis is the foundation and you're going to continue to build upon it, no matter how many efforts collapse. Just throw out those bad materials and go get some different materials and rebuild on the same foundation. Could something be wrong with the foundation? The question isn't even comprehensible in the business of propaganda.

Though readers want to rely on the publisher's imprint, the publisher's spokeswoman says — in so many words — don't rely on us. She says it "employs professional editors, copyeditors and proofreaders for each book project," but "we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking."

But enough about the publisher's mealy mouthpiece. The NYT headline says Naomi Wolf responded. During the interview, Wolf said “Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.” But the headline says after the interview. I see that Wolf wouldn't respond to the NYT's request for comment. So what is the Times talking about?

On Twitter, however, she said she is correcting parts of her book as a result of the discussion. And she and Mr. Sweet inadvertently offered a lesson on how to gracefully handle these sorts of situations on social media. Mr. Sweet explained the errors in Ms. Wolf’s book in a lengthy Twitter thread, while Ms. Wolf thanked him for calling her attention to the misunderstanding.

The NYT is being as kind to her as possible, I think. Here's how it describes her:

A prominent author who has written several works of feminist and cultural criticism, Ms. Wolf is known for books such as “The Beauty Myth” and “Vagina: A New Biography.”

She's "prominent." She gets on the talk shows. But why? Were any of the books that made her "prominent" based on good scholarship? Where are the serious scholars — the principled, devoted historians and philosophers — who didn't get on the shows because Naomi Wolf made books that had an attention-getting, stimulating "overall thesis"? It's an unresearched thesis of mine that such people exist. And now, I'm seeing...

A lot of people gleefully trashing Naomi Wolf, and her latest book does seem based on a big misunderstanding.

But, really, Wolf is just the Id of much modern historical scholarship: It too tells just-so stories to bolster the political orthodoxies of a small group of academics. https://t.co/D8yPOfsj7B

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) May 24, 2019

Here's how Wolf presents herself on Twitter:

Dr? What is her doctorate? I looked it up on Wikipedia:

"In October 2016, Ron Hiers and his wife, Carla, feeling despondent after years of addiction, had made a suicide pact to get high until they were dead, and ended up passed out by a bus stop in Memphis."

"A bystander live-streamed footage of the couple, and the video of them being mocked and laughed at was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people."

From "How Do You Recover After Millions Have Watched You Overdose?/Amid an opioid crisis, police and strangers with cameras are posting raw images of drug users passed out. For those whose bleakest moments now live online, life is never the same" (NYT).

The NYT embedded the video, so lots more people are seeing it now, including me. I'll refrain from embedding it, but I'll just say that the man and woman have fallen into ludicrous and humiliating positions on the sidewalk, and the passersby are circling around them, taking video and laughing at them. It's a very disturbing display of human despair and cruelty. The NYT doesn't mention it, but the man and woman on the sidewalk are white, and the people laughing at them are black.

IN THE COMMENTS: Rob said:

If Breitbart had embedded that, the Times would’ve accused them of racism. And they might have been right.

"T.M. Landry, a school in small-town Louisiana, has garnered national attention for vaulting its underprivileged black students to elite colleges. But the school cut corners and doctored college applications."

An exposé in the NYT. It ends:

“Write whatever you want to write about us on the negative side,” Mr. Landry told a reporter. “But at the end of the day, my sister, if we got kids at Harvard every day, I’m going to fight for Harvard. Why is it O.K. that Asians get to Harvard? Why is it O.K. that white people get to Harvard?”

Mr. Landry raised his voice. He accused The Times of saying that it was wrong for T.M. Landry to want the best for its black students. He told his students that he would always fight for them. “We need the haters,” he said. “I welcome the haters.”

He raised his arms on either side of him, forming a cross.

“My name is Michael Landry. I am the reformer,” he said. “They killed Jesus Christ because he could save the world. I say to myself, who are you compared to Jesus? Nothing! So I stick my arms out and say nail me to the cross if that’s what you want.”

Landry then goes into a practiced routine with the group of students he brought to his interview with the NYT. He calls out the language and they say "I love you" in that language. The final language is "Mike-a-nese!" (that is, Michael Landry's own language) and the students say "I love you" in "Mike-a-nese," which is: "Kneel!" Elsewhere in the article, we learn that he says he has the children kneel for 5 minutes at most to learn humility, but there are also stories of students kneeling for 2 hours and students "forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement."

This is a private school, with high tuition, in Louisiana. You may have enjoyed some of the videos of students from this school opening acceptance letters from, say, Harvard. Millions have shallowly warmed themselves watching that infectious propaganda.

"And, during this time, a female producer had me do a nude lineup with about five women who were much, much thinner than me."

"And we all stood side-by-side with only paste-ons covering our privates. After that degrading and humiliating lineup, the female producer told me I should use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet.... I asked to speak to a producer about the unrealistic diet regime and he responded by telling me he didn't know why everyone thought I was so fat, he thought I was perfectly 'fuckable.'"

Said Jennifer Lawrence, at Elle's Women in Hollywood, giving us a glimpse of the kind of female producers you get in Hollywood.

Listen up, columnists who proffer the solution of putting some more women in positions of executive power.* Women do hurt other women, and they can do it in a system in which the men are out to sexually exploit women. For one thing, some women are into sexually dominating/humiliating other women. For another, if the men are structuring the workplace around their own sexual interests, the women who rise within the power structure may be the ones who play along, facilitate, and demonstrate what tough gals they are. And then there's just good old fashioned woman-on-woman cruelty — all that envy and the burning desire to be The Woman.

_________________________

* For example, NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg, who reacted to the Harvey Weinstein story with "Put Women in Charge" (though, to her credit, she said, "Obviously, female bosses can be abusive and can create cultures where abusive behavior toward underlings is tolerated"):

Feminism’s energy has shifted left, toward women who want to dismantle the ruling class, not diversify it. When “broader female access to executive perches in Wall Street and Silicon Valley gets treated as some sort of movement-wide victory, then something clearly has gone wrong in our understanding of what feminism is and can do,” Jessa Crispin wrote in The New Republic. ...

Nevertheless, as long as we have a hierarchal society, the gender of those at the top matters....

After the left took out O'Reilly, it's no surprise to see #FireColbert heat up.

Yesterday, there was a lot of talk — including here, on this blog — about Stephen Colbert's over-the-top offensive joke "In fact, the only thing [Trump's] mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster."

I considered it unfit for network TV because it's so crudely sexual, but I've seen others denouncing it as homophobic. It didn't strike me that way. I saw it as just the usual disparagement implied toward the person who is getting penetrated in a blow job, the assumption being that this is a sexual act in which one person is serving and subordinated and the other is dominating and getting all the benefit. I think that is more blow-job-o-phobic than homophobic. The person getting disparaged could be another male or could be a female.

But in this particular application of the insult, the giver of the blow job, Trump, is male, so there was an opportunity to portray Colbert's joke as homophobic. The pro-Trump Daily Caller cleverly rested its accusation on a tweet by the non-pro-Trump Glenn Greenwald in "Gay Journalist Accuses Colbert Of Homophobia." Greenwald had tweeted "Homophobia for the right cause, with the right targets, it good homophobia, apparently." Vox — decidedly not pro-Trump — didn't like it either: "Stephen Colbert tried to insult Donald Trump. He made a homophobic comment instead."

This morning, I'm seeing in Newsweek that a #FireColbert movement has sprung up:

The overnight outrage was stoked, in part, by Mike Cernovich, once branded by The New Yorker "the meme mastermind of the alt-right." On Tuesday evening, Cernovich tweeted to his 258,000 followers an exchange Colbert had with an audience member last summer. The exchange took place during a question-and-answer session that was not broadcast as part of The Late Show.

Here's the clip. The question is what question would Colbert like to ask Trump, and Colbert's answer is "What does Vladimir Putin's dick taste like?"



I don't buy the homophobia characterization. If Colbert had wanted to joke about Hillary Clinton's coziness with Putin, he could have used exactly the same jokes.

But I can see why it seems to be great fun to go big with this and try to score a firing. I understand the lust on right to take out somebody on the left. It's a game of revenge.

What I hate about Colbert's jokes is the disparagement of sexuality, the old-fashioned shame, the sexist idea that the person doing the penetrating is humiliating the other. It's at least as sexist as it is homophobic, and Colbert — for all his efforts at seeming jauntily modern — is dragging along the despicable baggage of the past.

Creating a "fake news" tag and applying it retrospectively.

I'd been avoiding it, sticking to "journalism" and "propaganda" and "fake" — all well-established tags on this blog. But today, I gave in — because "fake news" is not just the subject of fake news. It also means the deployment of the term "fake news" and that's something I need to keep track of.

But having applied the tag retrospectively with a word search and an automatic function, I had to go in by hand and "keep track of" it backwards, into the past. There are recent utterly on-point applications of the tag. I just want to highlight a few older things:

May 5, 2016: "Gloria Steinem hopes Donald Trump will lose 'in a very definitive and humiliating way."

She wants humiliation. What is that about?

Oh, Gloria. Grandiosity goes before the fall. Your imperious arrogance looks so stupid now. As for the "fake news" tag. It didn't belong and was removed.

April 11, 2016: "It's sad for the paper. You know, it used to be considered a major paper. And now, it's like a super-market throw-out."

Said Donald Trump, invited to comment on the stupid Onion-like front page of yesterday's Boston Globe, which was all fake news about the horrors of an imagined Trump presidency.

That's me, using the term before the use of the term became a thing. And it's in the context of anti-Trump fake news. I'd forgotten about that Boston Globe front page story:

Is that ground-zero of the "fake news" subject? Maybe all the later effort to point to pro-Trump things as fake was generated to cover up the embarrassing Boston Globe screwup.

October 27, 2015: "I am convinced... that the way the Drive-Bys and the Democrat Party and the left are attempting to reconstitute their media monopoly is via Twitter and Facebook." That's a quote from Rush Limbaugh. He continues:

"In a way, the sewer of Twitter and Facebook is the left attempting to corral everyone into their playground, their way of thinking, and create a new legacy media to replace what the big three networks had back in 1988. You populate Twitter and Facebook with enough political activists disguised as citizens in their underwear in their basements just tapping out comments and posting left-wing news stories from AP, Reuters, Washington Post, New York Times, and that's how you reconstitute your monopoly. You don't constitute a network media monopoly, but you constitute a mode-of-thinking monopoly by transferring your polluted, perverted way of thinking to social media to infect as many minds as possible who are incapable of critical thinking anymore, because it isn't taught."

So Rush was complaining about fake news more than a year before the election, and it was in the context of liberal media trying to control everything. The flip today is that you have people like Hillary Clinton contending that social media needs to be regulated to control "fake news" that hurts liberals.

December 8, 2014: "Credulous journalist ponders why journalists are so credulous." Here, "fake" comes up in the context of a phrase that should be seen as an ancestor of "fake news": "fake but accurate":

The expression "fake but accurate" is really all we need to understand the problem, and it's pathetic that journalists at the WaPo level haven't fully internalized the lessons of these old scandals. Tweeting one day and cogitating over the general problem the next — it's so sloppy, so lazy, so stupid.

July 10, 2014: "It's hard to fathom why a movie about Rathergate — with Robert Redford as Dan Rather — is being made."

Years ago, Redford played the role of another newsman, Bob Woodward, in "All the President's Men," the story of 2 dogged journalists who were wildly successful. They brought down a President and sparked an American love affair with "investigative journalism." What's become of that today? Maybe this new movie will seriously address what has happened to the profession that Bob Woodward (and his partner Carl Bernstein) made us see as heroic and centered on truth-seeking. In Rathergate, a once-illustrious network, centered on ruining a presidential candidate, faked a document.

The movie will be called "Truth." Ironically? I doubt it....

Weiner's wiener is back in the news.

It's just another phallic Monday:

While his wife, Huma Abedin, travels the country campaigning for Hillary Clinton, the disgraced ex-congressman has been sexting with a busty brunette out West — and even sent her a lurid crotch shot with his toddler son in the picture, The Post has learned....

Weiner was clearly aroused by his conversation with the 40-something divorcee when he abruptly changed the subject.

“Someone just climbed into my bed,” Weiner wrote.

“Really?” she responded.

Weiner then hit “send” on the cringe-inducing image, which shows a bulge in his white, Jockey-brand boxer briefs and his son cuddled up to his left, wrapped in a light-green blanket.

“You do realize you can see you[r] Weiner in that pic??” the woman wrote.

Moments after forwarding the photo, Weiner freaked out over the possibility he had accidentally posted it publicly — just as he did during the infamous episode that forced him to resign from Congress in 2011.

“Ooooooh . . . I was scared. For half a second I thought I posted something. Stop looking at my crotch,” Weiner wrote back....

Carlos is into the danger. Have a little empathy. You know I do. It's his sexual orientation. And it's safe sex. Except the part where you humiliate your wife, whose name I'd put right next to the word "humiliate" if a thousand writers hadn't already done that juxtaposition. It's not a new humiliation, just another iteration of the old humiliation.

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

But this is Anthony Weiner's third time.

The first got him bullied out of Congress by who knows exactly which forces within the Democratic Party — Hillobaschumer? Tragic!

The second was when he was running for major of NYC, the comical repeat documented in the movie "Weiner," which we were just watching the other day. Yes, truly: farce. 

And now, again. Once more, with feeling. Once more, with the child in the picture. Once more, with open discussion of the excitement he gets from risking fucking his wife again. Fucking — I mean that metaphorically.

I'd say the third time is the modern psychological novel — inviting us to explore the complications of a modern marriage.

UPDATE: I put up a new post about Huma finally separating from Anthony: here.