Sex, Lies, Clinton, and Trump

Consider this: when more women than men attend college and graduate school by increasingly sizable numbers (Latina females over white males by 14%!) and the American male breadwinner looks to be going the way of the dodo bird, Hillary Clinton is basing her campaign for the presidency largely on breaking the glass ceiling.

Not only that, she is accusing her putative opponent Donald Trump of sexism. This is the woman who blamed her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” apparently imputing magical-mystical aphrodisiac powers to conservatives.

The Donald — you’ll be surprised to hear if you’ve been living on Pluto — has been firing back, sweeping Mr. Hillary, now supposedly about to stump for his wife, into the fray.

“You look at whether it’s Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones or many of them,” Trump said on NBC’s TODAY. “That certainly will be fair game. Certainly if they play the woman’s card with respect to me, that will be fair game.”

In recent days, the GOP front-runner has been highlighting the former president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, saying that Bill Clinton has a pattern of “abuse of women.”

Some, like Brent Budowsky over at The Hill, are warning Trump to keep his hands off our Bill:

When I was growing up in New York, I wanted to be a professional boxer, but was smart enough to know that if I entered the ring with Muhammad Ali — then heavyweight champion of the world — they’d have to bring out the smelling salts within seconds and the ambulance would soon arrive to cart me away on a stretcher!

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump should consider such thoughts as he ponders his plan to go mano a mano against Bill Clinton, the most popular living former president and the heavyweight champion of American politics today.

In the immortal words of the great Luigi Pirandello, “It Is So, If You Think So,” Brent. Or “Right You Are, If You Think You Are.”

In the real world of (soon-to-be) 2016, Bill may have met his match with The Donald. It’s been many moons, roughly sixteen times twelve, since the yclept Bubba was in the White House and, yes, he has sorta been in the public eye, but not nearly on the level of Trump, and he doesn’t have near the capability of commandeering the media the way Donald does. No one has. (When Ali attempted a comeback in 1980, he lost to Larry Holmes and then to the relatively-obscure Trevor Berbick. It wasn’t pretty.)

More importantly, times have changed and morality with it. I don’t think Bill, and certainly Hillary, would want Juanita Broaddrick brought up at a time when, on our campuses, even an unwanted kiss is legally considered rape, thanks to Title IX. Can you imagine how many instances of what is called “unwanted touching” could come out of the woodwork now if Bill started to pick a fight with Trump? It’s hard to imagine Clinton making it through Georgetown or Yale Law under today’s rules, or even through his freshman year.

The truth is Bill’s relationships with women are the product of another era, one that is fading remarkably fast in the rear view mirror. There is little tolerance these days for his kind of behavior — no more winking — not in the USA anyway. Clinton’s well known hypocritical wagging of the finger at the television to swear to us that he “never had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” may not have looked terrific back when he did it, but today it would seem downright repellent. Imagine it being played again and again next to a Hillary commercial.

Doubtless Donald Trump has not been a saint, but there is a big difference between him and Bill. The Donald may often be rude. He may be a thin-skinned bloviator. But he’s not a creepy hypocrite. In that sense he’s the opposite of the Clintons, both of them.

Lastly, what if Trump were to raise the Jeffrey Epstein case?…. whoa.