A NPR host who once said that Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro were "schlonged" in 1984 said that the schlonging he referred to was fundamentally different from the schlonging Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton received at the hands of Barack Obama in 2008:

... during an interview with our own Chris Cillizza four years ago, former "Talk of the Nation" host Neal Conan mentioned the 1984 Walter Mondale/Geraldine Ferraro campaign and remarked, "That ticket went on to get schlonged at the polls." But Conan, semi-retired as a macadamia nut farmer in Hawaii (seriously), tells me that as far as he knows the term ismeant to connote genitalia. And he doesn't think his usage makes Trump's okay.

... [Conan said] I think there's a difference in the way [Trump and I] used it. I referred to the Mondale/Ferraro ticket, while he used it very specifically to refer to one person – a woman.

So what Conan is saying is that if the schlonging refers to a man and a woman, that is not nearly as bad as talking about a woman alone without a male suffering with her.

This, of course, makes no sense at all.  It is merely another case of OK when liberals do it, but not when conservatives or Donald Trump does it.

The larger issue about Donald Trump's comment is that it does not help Trump to raise these kinds of issues.  If Trump is the nominee, he is going to need to woo undecided voters.  There are a lot of voters out there who are unhappy with Hillary Clinton's cronyism and wrongdoings and effeteness, but they need to be given a reason to vote for Trump.  Independent women are going to be turned off by a candidate who talks about Hillary being "schlonged."

Believe it or not, many undecided women who aren't die-hard Trump supporters are turned off by that kind of language.  Trump claims he is brilliant because he went to the Wharton School of Business.  But he doesn't act like that when he needlessly alienates voters, whether by calling Iowa voters stupid if they don't vote for him, saying Jews won't vote for him because they can't control him with their money, or this latest.  To deny that "schlong" has any sexual connotation is to deny reality.

A better approach was taken by Trump's spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, when she said:

"Hillary Clinton has some nerve to talk about the war on women and the bigotry toward women when she has a serious problem in her husband," she continued, alluding to former President Bill Clinton's notorious affair with Monica Lewinsky.

"What's interesting about this, this notion of being bullied is, I mean, I can think of quite a few women that have been bullied by Hillary Clinton to hide her husband's misogynist, sexist secrets," Pierson said.

I love Trump's approach to building a border fence, deporting illegals, getting rid of birthright citizenship, ending Muslim immigration, and more, but I get nervous when he says dumb things.  His business background shows he knows how to put deals together, but sometimes he's clueless when it comes to understanding how he needlessly creates unnecessary controversies.  Winning a narrow plurality of the Republican vote, if he does even that, is not proof of his ability to do so in the general election, which is a completely different ballgame, where he cannot so easily afford to alienate people at will. 

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.