The response to the New York Times story about Trump’s taxes may mark peak stupid in this election season — and that’s saying something.

As I wrote yesterday in USA Today and as Rich and Charlie and especially our friend Ryan Ellis* have even more ably chronicled, there’s nothing wrong with paying what you owe in taxes and nothing more. Virtually no liberal screaming bloody murder over the last two days disagrees with this — at least not when it comes to their own taxes. The Clinton campaign’s effort to make it sound like Trump dodged his taxes is understandably dishonest and cynical (neither campaign observes any meaningful standards of honesty or decency). But the media’s reckless parroting of this nonsense, particularly on Twitter, is just embarrassing.

But the stupidity hardly ends there. Trump clearly wants his subalterns to proclaim that he’s a genius – a genius! — for avoiding paying income taxes. This is like a steroidal version of the old Steve Martin routine about how you can be a millionaire without paying taxes “First, get a million dollars.” Only in Trump’s case it goes, “First, lose a billion dollars.” Ok, I’m rounding up but you get the point. The idea that only the craftiest, cleverest, most nimble financial thinker in the world would come up with the idea of trying to write off a Net Operating Loss of a billion dollars is preposterous. The only damning thing about the Times story is that it shows what a lackluster businessman he really was. Look at the chart here to get a sense of it. The headline of my USA Today piece calls him “smart” for not paying income taxes. I didn’t write the headline. A better one would have been, “Trump would have been dumb to pay income taxes.”

Just as preposterous, however, is the notion peddled by Mark Cuban, Trump’s billionaire bête noire, that “After military service, the most patriotic thing you can do as a wealthy person is pay your taxes.” (Note: The Hill, which has descended deep into clickbait whoredom of late, tweeted the quote, but omitted the “after military service” part). Paying taxes is not patriotic. It’s not unpatriotic either. It’s the frick’n law. If you don’t pay your taxes, people with guns will come to your house and take your stuff, or they’ll take you to prison, or both.

Last, as I noted in my USAT piece, what’s particularly annoying is that in 2012 liberals excoriated anyone who said that the “47 percent” don’t pay taxes. Liberals would shriek, “they do too! They pay sales taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes etc!” And the liberals were right — to a point (lots of people receive more from the government than they pay in, but that’s a conversation for another time). Trump pays lots of taxes, just not income taxes. Why? Because he lost a billion dollars on casinos!

* Full disclosure: Ryan also prepares my taxes. He’s great at it and I highly recommend him. And I remembered to bring my W2s in case you thought he was talking about me.