RUTHFULLY YOURS

How many of this presidential campaign’s closing days will Americans spend pondering things said and done ages ago? Before November 8, will we imagine the future or solely inspect the past?

Americans lately have been divided and tense over things that happened more than a decade in the rear-view mirror:

2005 (Donald J. Trump’s crude and degrading X-rated remarks from eleven years ago have dominated the news since Friday afternoon.)

1998 (The Monica Lewinsky affair, Bill Clinton’s subsequent impeachment, and Hillary Clinton’s efforts to denigrate Lewinsky as the fiasco unfolded.)

1996 (Trump’s comments about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado and her fluctuating weight.)

1995 (Illegally leaked excerpts from Trump’s tax return.)

1978 (Bill Clinton’s alleged rape of Arkansas public servant Juanita Broaddrick and Hillary’s allegedly pressuring her into silence. “How many times must it be said? Actions speak louder than words,” Broaddrick responded to Trump’s lewd conversation with Billy Bush, then with Access Hollywood. She continued Friday night via Twitter: “DT said bad things! HRC threatened me after BC raped me.”)

1975 (Hillary Clinton defended Thomas Alfred Taylor against charges that he raped Kathy Shelton, age 12; he got off with time served; Shelton was raped so violently that she remained in a coma for five days and was rendered infertile. In a 1980s interview with Arkansas journalist Roy Reed, Hillary found her experience hilarious. As she explained at the time: “He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.” She then burst into laughter.)

These controversies, scandals, and accusations are legitimate issues and worthy of debate.

It is no surprise, of course, that Hillary and her media allies ironically have capsized the campaign theme song that helped the Clintons win the White House in 1992. Upending Fleetwood Mac, the Clintons now sing, “Don’t Start Thinking about Tomorrow.”

Hillary would pump Obama’s big-budget, high-tax, and red-tape toxins into an economy that “grows” this year at an imperceptible 0.95 percent, amid the slowest recovery since 1949. Clinton stands shoulder to shoulder with Black Lives Matter, promising four more years of decaying race relations. Clinton also would keep leading from behind, guaranteeing hotter flames around the world.

No wonder, then, that she and her cheerleaders in America’s newsrooms keep voters focused on yesterday.

For Trump’s part — despite eloquently delivering via teleprompter several intelligent, specific, policy-driven speeches — he also discusses Crooked Hillary’s character flaws, primarily her current E-mailgate, Clinton Foundation, and Benghazi scandals.

But he, too, has jackhammered into the Clintons’ malfeasance vaults and excavated ancient controversies and outrages.

Trump also has chomped like a rainbow trout into the baited hooks that Hillary has tossed into the waters where he swims. This has distracted him from his forward-looking game and made him turn backwards.

A few minutes into Sunday’s debate Donald Trump’s decade-old crude sexual banter with a reporter from an entertainment show was mentioned by the CNN moderator. Donald again apologized for the comments, and Hillary immediately pounced on Trump’s misogyny, throwing in his alleged racism and Islamophobia. To his credit, Trump ignored her slurs and attacked her record. When Democrat loyalist Martha Raddatz pressed on, Trump let loose with a powerful contrast with Bill’s record of abuse––which Hillary side-stepped.

Welcome to another debate on everything except the issues. Consider the reporting on Trump’s comments, which is the mother of all dog-bites-man-stories. I don’t know what cocoon you have to come from not to know that every single day millions of men––and women–– of all ages, races, and sexual persuasions exchange vulgar, crude banter about sex. And you’d have to be particularly dumb, or duplicitous, to be shocked that a New Yorker with a flamboyant and braggadocios personality who is involved in casinos, reality television, construction, and beauty pageants probably would do so on a regular basis. Or, if not dumb, then a partisan hack indulging in rank hypocrisy in order to gain political advantage. Welcome to another episode of America’s political hypocrisy and sexual schizophrenia.

The Dems, of course, and their minions in the media are hyping this story for obvious reasons. Their candidate has a long history of lies and money-grubbing, possesses no political charisma, and touts no policy proposals other than the same dull progressive clichés and failed ideas. Donald’s juvenile sex-talk is a perfect distraction from the steady drip of revelations about Hillary’s email and server scandal, pay-for-play foundation, video evidence of her questionable health, and news reports from abroad documenting daily her disastrous management of foreign affairs while Secretary of State. And don’t forget the WikiLeaks release of her Wall Street speeches transcripts, which show her political duplicity and cozy ties to the 1%.

What makes this latest bout of misdirection particularly hypocritical is the glaringly obvious record of Bill Clinton’s sexual depredations, from his time in Arkansas to his sex-tourism on convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express. Most men engage in smutty talk of exaggerated sexual conquests and fantasies about future trophies. But we know of only one who as governor and then president abused his power to fulfill his sordid wishes in the Arkansas State House and the White House, besmirching the dignity and honor of an office supposedly devoted to serving the people and upholding the Constitution. And few women, when their guilty husband is exposed, unleash a nuclear bombardment of harassment and vilification of the sort famous “feminist” Hillary Clinton launched. The same woman who is now calling Trump’s banter “horrific” was described by her own courtier George Stephanopoulos as someone who will “savage her enemies,” as she did the victims of Bill’s sexual assaults.

At the lowest point in the second presidential debate Hillary Clinton tried to blame her compulsive lying on Abraham Lincoln. Not the real Lincoln, but the fictional version depicted in the Spielberg movie.

“She lied. Now she’s blaming the lie on the late great Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said in exasperation. “Honest Abe never lied.”

The only thing Hillary and Lincoln have in common is Illinois.

If Hillary had been looking for wisdom from Lincoln, she might have started with the famous quote often attributed to him. “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” It’s been a while since Hillary has been able to fool anybody.

The majority of the country holds an unfavorable view of her. Even in a blue state like California, 53 percent of the voters have an unfavorable view of the woman they are most likely going to end up voting for. It’s not just that Hillary is a liar and a crook. Plenty of politicians are. It’s that her dishonesty and corruption are so blatant as to be insulting to the intelligence of even the dimmest voter.

Hillary’s lies come apart within 5 minutes of being told. And yet nothing is ever her fault. Previously she had blamed her rogue email operation on Colin Powell. Now she decided to blame her lies on Lincoln.

By the second debate, the topic was no longer who should be president, but who should be in jail. Both candidates were clear that their opponent was utterly unfit to hold office.

Trump was the clearest of all about it. “Because you’d be in jail,” he said. “If I win, I’m going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” he promised.

Jail is where Hillary belongs. Her stained sheet of crimes goes back quite a few decades by now.

And her campaign has done more to demonstrate the widespread networks of establishment corruption than a thousand investigations could have ever managed to do. From the Clinton Foundation to the media, her base of support is as rotten as she is. And just as ruthless and determined.

The referee should have stopped it in the tenth. Punching at will, Donald Trump said, “Hillary used the power of her office to make $250 million. Why not put some money in? You made a lot of it while you were secretary of State? Why aren’t you putting money into your own campaign? Just curious.” Reeling and against the ropes, Clinton gasped that she supported … the Second Amendment. It was a brilliant rhetorical device: under the rubric of campaign financing, Trump slipped in an allegation that Clinton corruptly enriched herself by using the power of her office for personal gain–and Clinton didn’t even respond. That’s a win by a knockout.

That’s the decisive issue of the campaign: the corrupt machinations of a ruling elite that considers itself above the law, and the rage of the American people against the oligarchical ruling class that has pulled the ladder up behind it. Trump’s bombshell below Clinton’s waterline came at the end of the debate, well prepared by jabs at Clinton’s erased emails and Bill’s rapes. Trump used the “J” word–that is, jail. That was perhaps the evening’s most important moment. This is not an election fought over competing policies but a struggle for legitimacy. A very large portion of the electorate (how large a portion we will discover next month) believes that its government is no longer legitimate, and that it has become the instrument of an entrenched rent-seeking oligarchy.

By and large, I agree with this reading. “America’s economy is corrupt, cartelized and anti-competitive,” I wrote in August. It is typical of rent-seeking that Lockheed Martin’s stock price has tripled during the past three years, and payment to its top management team has risen from $12 million a year to over $60 million a year, while Lockheed Martin’s F-35 languishes in cost overruns and deployment delays. Produce a lemon and get rich: that’s Washington. It is not a trivial matter, or unrepresentative of our national condition, that the FBI director who declined to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling of classified material just returned to government from a stint at Lockheed Martin, where he was paid $6 million for a single year’s service. I don’t know whether FBI Director Comey is corrupt. But it looks and smells terrible.

That’s why it was so important for Trump to talk about jail time for his opponent. If things had not gotten to the point where former top officials well might belong in jail, Trump wouldn’t be there in the first place. The Republican voters chose a reckless, independently wealthy, vulgar, rough-edged outsider precisely because they believe that the system is corrupt. They are right to so believe; if the voters knew a tenth of what I know about it, they would march on Washington with pitchforks.

We are now engaged in a national debate and a final judgment as to which candidate has engaged in the more despicable behavior. Is it the crude offhand private comments of Donald Trump, or the malfeasance of a very high official in the federal government who has enriched herself personally and put national security at risk?

To consider Trump’s private conversations from 11 years ago of equal weight with Hillary Clinton’s lying, deception, destroying subpoenaed official communications, and self aggrandizement at the expense of national security is absurd.

It can be argued that both Hillary and Trump have engaged in inappropriate behavior.

However, it is crystal clear which behavior is more destructive to our country. Locker room talk has yet to sink a nation. Open borders, lying to the public, foreign deals behind closed doors, and enriching oneself via a position of trust have all the potential to do so.

Also clear is that the release of these Trump tapes is perfectly timed to offset and distract from the incredibly damaging email releases concerning Hillary and her campaign manager John Podesta.

The releases confirmed of suspicions that she holds “public” positions that are falsely represented, and that she invites Wall Street bankers to police themselves, she promotes open borders and dealt with foreign entities while offering her husband’s oratory and money wiring instructions. Education grants through the State Department were issued to businesses that showed their gratitude by hiring Bill as an honorarium chancellor for $17 million.

Apparently the much-heralded Russian “reset” involved selling 25% of our uranium to that increasingly unfriendly nation. It wasn’t enough for our astronauts to rely on Russian transportation to space, or our satellites to be orbited with the help of Russian rocketry.

Donald Trump entered Sunday night’s debate both lacerated and liberated.

He had been lacerated by the release of a now infamous videotape in which he talked about how he seduces women, including married women.

And he was liberated by essentially declaring his independence from the Republican party and its leading figures, many of whom abandoned him over the release of that tape.

So the question approaching an epic presidential debate Sunday night was whether, in this new phase, a liberated Donald Trump could stop the bleeding and get back on his feet. In the first half hour, that seemed unlikely. But then, over the next hour, he appeared to succeed.

In those raucous opening minutes, Hillary Clinton declared that Mr. Trump isn’t fit to be president of the United States. In return, he promised that, if he is elected, he will order his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her.

And those were only the highlights of an opening phase that was simply shocking in the intense nature of the personal attacks between the two people vying to become the next president of the United States. And that seemed unlikely to allow him to recover.

Then a different kind of debate evolved—one that was still pointed and nasty, but substantive.

Mr. Trump, who had seemed on his heels at the outset, recovered to deliver an effective critique of President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul. He defended his seemingly friendly attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin by saying simply that it’s worth getting along with Russia if the Kremlin will help attack Islamic State.

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Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton clashed over everything from his remarks about women to Syria to taxes. Watch the highlights in three minutes. Photo: Getty

At one remarkable point in discussing the vicious civil war in Syria, he acknowledged he disagrees with his own running mate, Gov. Mike Pence, on whether to confront aggressive Russian tactics there.

The candidates engaged in a spirited but enlightening debate on tax policy during which, in an odd twist, two wealthy Americans each accused the other of being in favor of helping other wealthy Americans.

He may have interrupted Mrs. Clinton a bit too often, and engaged in what some will consider bullying tactics. Yet once the atmosphere calmed down, those moments seemed less frequent than in their first debate.

Mrs. Clinton still was the greater master of policy detail, and she delivered her own critique of the so-called Obamacare health law and what she would do to fix the crown jewel of her party’s domestic policy achievements in recent years. She continued to hammer Mr. Trump on disparaging comments he’s made over time about immigrants, Muslims and, especially, women.

She delivered a sharp critique, for example, of Mr. Trump’s proposal, made earlier this year, to ban all Muslims from entering the country.