Dr. Strangelove

The memo reads like it was written by an AI bot trained exclusively on Twitter accounts that follow Elon Musk, but there's no doubt who's behind this Dr. Strangelove effort to launch a nuclear bomb right at the heart of the American economy: Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist ghoul Trump nominated to run the OMB.

Creator Henrik Jansson-Schweizer has fashioned from this real-life minor international incident a whimsical satire, like “Dr. Strangelove” filtered through “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” in which just such an event occurs — though apart from a droll pair of fishermen who serve as an unimpressed chorus, and the idea that it is better to be friendly than fight, the resemblance to that film ends there.

Summarizing the mood at the meeting in an article for the news site Aspen Journalism, reporter Heather Sackett wrote that “speakers invoked Dr. Strangelove, the Hunger Games and Alice in Wonderland to convey the dire, darkly dystopian and illusory state of the negotiations.”

“There’s no political meaning. It’s not ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ ” he said.

In the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove,” the unhinged Gen. Jack D. Ripper declares that “fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face” — echoing the position of the John Birch Society.