Sex lives matter

OPINION:

History is full of surprises. Never have I, looking back on history, found it to go precisely as I had anticipated it would go. Always the reality of history’s progress plays tricks on us. It now appears that the sexual revolution begun in the late 1960s is ending, and would it not be spectacular if one or two of its most famous products were done in by this historic turn of events?

I am not talking about Donald Trump. I am talking about Hillary and Bill Clinton. They flourished in the sexual revolution and all the excesses and nihilism of the 1960s and 1970s. Now would it not be justice to see them unhorsed and abandoned as history takes a new path? “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” was Bill’s anthem in 1992. Well, we now have our tomorrow, and it is not what the Clintons expected. They anticipated an endless 1968, but history has played another of its surprises.

Last week an echo of Donald Trump’s former life came back to haunt him. Yet it was clearly an episode from his former life as an entertainer. Moreover, it was just talk, locker room banter, braggadocio uttered over a decade ago. In the last few years Donald has been thinking about more important things. Now he is in the last stages of a presidential race. Such language is unthinkable from him today, and he has apologized for the language of his entertainment days. What he talks about today is tax cuts, job creation, and securing America’s place in the world. Sunday night at the debate he demonstrated his seriousness, and once again he convinced voting Americans of how serious he is in this new phase of his life. He won the debate.

He also convinced Americans, many of whom were not even born in the late 1960s and 1970s, that the sexual revolution was not so nice for some women. He introduced America to Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey and Kathy Shelton, who were victims of the sexual excesses of the past. More specifically, three of them were among the scores of women who have been abused by Bill Clinton’s actions, not by the coarse words uttered by Donald in the back of a bus years ago. What makes Bill’s actions all the more relevant is that his wife has for 40 years enabled him. Hillary did not walk out on Bill when he allegedly raped Mrs. Broaddrick or fondled Mrs. Willey in the White House or propositioned Mrs. Jones or carried on such actions from the 1970s to the present. In many instances she hired private investigators to hound these women, a matter I wrote about here last week.

When Bill was caught lying about not having sex with Monica Lewinsky in the White House Hillary sent her close aide, Sidney Blumenthal, to vilify Monica as a “stalker.” When Sidney asked Christopher Hitchens to lie about this, Christopher appeared before Congress and said Mr. Blumenthal was lying. It began Christopher’s fitful journey toward conservatism.

What struck me Sunday night when Donald sat with a panel of the Clintons’ victims is how the Clintons could have gotten away with this abuse of women in the 1990s. The Clintons and the mainstream media had no interest in these women’s stories or in any of the other women who threatened to come forward with their stories during Bill’s impeachment. Then the widely accepted palliative of America’s elites was “it’s only sex.”

Now history has entered a new phase. Americans do not dismiss a woman when she complains of unwanted advances from a man, much less unwanted advances from a governor or a president. And when his wife covers up for him, I think there will be consequences. Let us see how the events of last Sunday play out. My guess is they will be serious.

I believe the charges against Hillary have attained a critical mass. All her lies, deceits and negligence captured by Hillary’s high-tech server remind me of Bill’s DNA captured on Monica’s blue dress. Both constitute high-tech evidence that the Clintons have been lying to America for decades. Further, Hillary is untrustworthy and incompetent. She should not have been secretary of State and she will not be president. Donald’s focused presentation of his policies the other night contrasted starkly with Hillary’s. He beat her badly in the debate with very sound policies to her tired policies from the past. Now he has to beat her in the election.

• R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is author of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson Inc.