OPINION:
Only the blind couldn’t see this coming. Hillary Clinton’s primary claim to the White House has always been about sex: “It’s time for a woman in the White House.” Her most loyal constituency is the feminist movement. She would need an October surprise that would play a female card with devastating consequences, to sway uncommitted women to seal her victory. She found the card, played it, and the election still hangs in the balance.
The world, so the big media tells us (and tells us and tells us), has been set aflame by the recording of a private conversation made 11 years ago. Donald Trump used the coarse word “pussy,” a word teenage boys giggle over in the high school locker room when they’re not talking about cats. Boys will be boys, and sometimes men will be, too.
The Donald says Bill Clinton said worse to him when they were golfing buddies, and only the terminally naive doubt it. Hillary’s Secret Service detail said she used language that turned the air blue in the White House, dishing the p-word and the f-word and the c-s word, words that blistered the paint off the walls, words that would make a sailor or an NFL linebacker blush. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump apologized on social media and again in person at the Sunday night debate. The record does not show that Hillary ever has.
The hysteria over words, some of it by Republicans who cower in fright the first time someone says boo! at them, serves no purpose because the objective isn’t to teach gentlemanly behavior, but to destroy a Republican campaign. Whipped by media personalities who earn big bucks titillating the nation with a morbid and vulgar fascination with sex, Democrats demand that Donald Trump drop out of the race. Some, like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, his knees all a-tremble, followed their lead.
Hillary, suppressing a smirk and looking for her purse, the smelling salts and a fainting couch, played the offended maiden aunt Sunday night. “You know,” she said, “with prior Republican nominees, for president, I disagreed with them. Politics, policies, principles. But I never questioned their fitness to serve. Donald Trump is different. I said starting back in June, that he was not fit to be president and commander in chief.”
The Donald might agree that not all pigs live on the farm. Bubba, who broke down the brush in pursuit of every gilt or sow who came in his view, taught us that. Seduction was for sissies, in the credible telling by some of the women in his past, a man must have rape. To remind a new generation of voters, Mr. Trump invited three women who were victims of Bubba’s barnyard appetite to the debate. The Donald deserves correction for piggish language, but if disrespect of women disqualifies candidates for high office, Bubba would have been run out of town on a rail long ago, with Hillary, the enabler, riding sidesaddle.
The new disclosures about Hillary, and how she told her Wall Street donors that sometimes she lies but only to the public, show again how she routinely puts her personal ambitions above everything else. The new WikiLeaks disclosures reveal Hillary’s speeches on Wall Street to be far more outrageous than the Donald’s inexcusably lewd banter. She has been playing everyone for fools.
Salty language was indulged in American politics long before the Donald — Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson might have made Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s delicate skin crawl — and the only issue before grown-ups now is which candidate can lead the nation to repair the damage done by eight years of Barack Obama. The important “p” words are policy, and “p” for a president who puts acts above words. It’s all that really matters.
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