RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Hillary Clinton campaign video featuring Confederate flags and goobers in white sheets ominously informs, “If Trump wins, they could be running the country.”

Mike Tyson didn’t bite Evander Holyfield’s ears because the knockout artist felt he was winning.

Such flouting of the Marquess of Queensberry rules of politics (a much rougher sport than boxing) coming in late summer rather than mid fall demonstrates either desperation, deviousness, or both. Though Clinton holds a lead — sometimes slight, sometimes sizable — in recent polls, she suffered through one of the worst weeks of her campaign.

The Associated Press proved that donating money to her “charity” served as the best way to secure a meeting with her as secretary of state. Eighty-five of the 154 people outside of government successful in gaining face time with the secretary did so after donating to the Clinton Foundation.

Rather than answer questions, Clinton attempted to change the subject by going below the belt. “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia,” Mrs. Clinton maintained Thursday in a Reno speech. “He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.”

The depiction of a Queens Kleagle strikes as far-fetched. The world of mullets, meth, and monster trucks seems as far removed from Trump Tower as one can imagine. But Clinton-Kaine seeks to strangely make it all stick. And hey, he fired Omarosa, didn’t he?

The chutzpah of the negative campaigning appears especially audacious when considering the history of the Democratic Party and, to a lesser extent, its standard bearer.

Hillary Clinton called Senator Robert Byrd not a racist but her “mentor.” From the beginning of the Carter presidency until the end of the Reagan administration, Hillary’s party looked to the former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops as its exalted leader in the United States Senate.

Hillary Clinton accepted the Margaret Sanger Award in 2009. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously,” she told Planned Parenthood, “her courage, her tenacity, her vision.” But this vision included blaming Jews and Italians for causing “the multiplication of the unfit in this country,” judging “the Aboriginal Australian” the “lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development,” and using the n-word in private correspondence. If she sounds like an ideal speaker for a KKK rally in some barn, that’s because Sanger really once spoke at a KKK rally in some barn.

In the 2008 primary elections, Hillary Clinton birthed birtherism by relying on an outlined campaign strategy to highlight Obama’s “lack of American roots.” This underhanded effort included the dissemination of a picture of Obama in Somali dress, a subsequently fired Iowa aide advancing in a mass email that “Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim,” and numerous Clinton backers, long before Donald Trump jumped on this bandwagon to Idiotsville, promoting the idea of the future president’s foreign birth. Clinton’s ever-present aide Huma Abedin, we discovered this past week, worked as an editor for twelve years for an Islamic journal that blamed the United States for 9/11 and alleged that American Jews “work the system” and rely on memories of the Holocaust to get their way.

The party she leads compiled a more ignominious record.

The Democratic Party rejected a resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan at its 1924 convention, which witnessed the famous “Klanbake” that included hundreds of KKK delegates to the convention celebrating by burning crosses. Its most revered president, Franklin Roosevelt, appointed former Klansman Hugo Black to the U.S. Supreme Court. Donald Trump does not represent the party of Jefferson Davis, George Wallace, Theodore Bilbo, and Bull Connor. Hillary Clinton does.

This does not make her, as Donald Trump alleged, a “bigot.” It does make her terribly brazen in ignoring the skeletons in her, and her party’s, closet.