Tennis player John McEnroe would respond to an official call he didn’t like, when his reaction was printable, with the sentence “You cannot be serious!”

That was what came to mind with Hillary Clinton’s recent ridiculous assertion, chronicled by James Taranto:

The former first lady pleaded poverty: “We came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt. . . . We struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education, you know, it was not easy. . . . We had to make double the money, because of, obviously, taxes, and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members.”

There is some truth to this: According to the Associated Press: “[Mrs.] Clinton’s Senate financial disclosure forms, filed for 2000, show assets between $781,000 and almost $1.8 million. . . . The same form, however, showed that the Clintons owed between $2.3 million and $10.6 million in legal bills.”

In response, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus tells the AP: “Whether she was flat broke or not is not the issue. It’s tone deaf to average people.”

Yet there are some factual problems with Mrs. Clinton’s assertions. National Review’s Andrew Johnson notes a New York Times report from December 2000, more than a month before the end of Mr. Clinton’s term, that Mrs. Clinton had just inked a book contract with an $8 million advance.

That’s before agent fees and taxes, and even the gross amount is less than the upper estimate of the Clintons’ legal debt, so you can see why she might have felt it necessary to accept some speaking fees too. Only she couldn’t. By the time Mr. Clinton left office, Mrs. Clinton was already a U.S. senator, and Senate rules prohibit members from accepting honoraria (book fees are an exception). She didn’t start speaking for money until she left the secretary of state’s office. By that point the Clinton’s financial security was no longer in question.

Then again, who says the average American can’t relate to this sort of thing? Think of it this way: If somebody offered you $200,000 to give a speech, wouldn’t you take it? You may not be the average American, but we’ll bet she would too.

The average  American family does not “piece together the resources for mortgages for houses,” because the average American family does not own more than one house. The average American family does not send its single child to Stanford, Oxford (in Britain,  not Ohio) and Columbia. Then again, the average American family does not have seven- and eight-digit legal bills because its male head lied to a grand jury about his own personal extramarital conduct.

The headline refers to another ’80s figure, Leona Helmsley, who once claimed that only the little people pay taxes. Given Hillary’s statement about “obviously, taxes,” maybe she’ll include a middle-class tax break as part of her 2016 campaign. (I know, I know: You cannot be serious.)

Meanwhile, Facebook fulfills its role in our social discourse with …