RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Now we know why Hillary Clinton has never released the transcripts of her speeches to bankers. If the excerpts published by WikiLeaks last week are any guide, the texts might have cost her the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders. Even these excerpts explain why a majority of Americans don’t believe she’s honest or trustworthy.

The Clinton campaign says it doesn’t have the time to confirm the authenticity of the excerpts, which appear in emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. But they sure seem to be the real thing because Mrs. Clinton’s message sounds so synthetic.

She was making the rounds of the big-money speaking circuit after her stint as Secretary of State and before her anticipated run for President. The bankers were thus eager to please her with fat fees ($4.1 million in two years, according to disclosure reports), while Mrs. Clinton was eager to please the bankers with what they wanted to hear.

At a Goldman Sachs event in 2013, she said that “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.” You know, like her. In another speech at a Goldman event, she said, “you are the smartest people.” That must have made the masters of the universe feel better. She also lamented the “politicizing” of the 2008 financial crisis, as if she has had nothing to do with that. And she told a Deutsche Bank audience that financial reform “really has to come from the industry itself.” We’re willing to bet that Elizabeth Warren didn’t vet those remarks in advance. The Democratic presidential nominee also praised free trade to an audience hosted by a Brazilian bank, even as she has run as a protectionist in 2016.

Some voters may see these private remarks as a signal of what they hope will be her pragmatism, and had the transcripts appeared during the primaries they would have cost her progressive political support. But that doesn’t mean she believes what she told the bankers. Our guess is that Mrs. Clinton was conning the bankers whom she knew she would need for campaign checks in addition to those sweet $200,000 speaking fees. CONTINUE AT SITE

Beyond its vulgar details, Americans didn’t learn much new about Donald Trump in the video of his sexual boasting with Billy Bush. Anybody paying attention already knew Mr. Trump is crude and loutish and given to crassly judging women by their looks. His exchange with Megyn Kelly of Fox News in the first GOP debate made that clear. Republican voters nominated him despite these risks, and the release of an especially lewd and nasty 11-year-old tape put Mr. Trump’s candidacy in crisis as he faced the second presidential debate Sunday night.

Our email inbox is filled with Republicans saying this is a double standard because while Mr. Trump may talk like a lout, Bill Clinton acts like one and Hillary Clinton enables him. Oh, and Democrats still revere JFK, who was a sexual predator in the White House.

This is all true, and it is a bit much to see the same liberals who said Mr. Clinton’s actual exploitation of an intern was merely about sex, or who called Paula Jones trailer trash, now wax indignant about Mr. Trump’s bragging. The same moralists who celebrate misogyny in pop music and a sex-crazed culture are also conveniently outraged by a man who was marinated in that culture before he entered politics.

Yet as a matter of cold political reality these objections don’t matter. Mr. Trump’s behavior is offensive to traditional standards of decent male behavior, and conservatives rightly made the case that “character counts” against Mr. Clinton in the White House.

Even before the tape and his half-apologies, Mr. Trump was underperforming with college-educated Republicans, especially women. The tape may disqualify him with these voters, and more such tapes may surface. Democrats know how to do opposition research, and Mr. Trump’s past is an opponent’s field of dreams.

This is the political reality that Mr. Trump confronted Sunday night, and the question was whether he did enough to repair the damage to his candidacy by asking voters to look past his comments to the larger stakes of the election. On that score he did better on the issues than he did in apologizing.

Mr. Trump was less effective in the first half hour because his apology for the tape seemed too grudging. He also couldn’t resist going after Bill Clinton’s sexual abuses, which didn’t make Mr. Trump look any more presidential. Americans already know about the Clinton deceptions about sex, which is one reason polls show that most Americans don’t want to vote for Hillary. That’s the main—the only—reason Mr. Trump is still within striking distance after his many blunders.

Mr. Trump’s problem is that voters aren’t sure they trust him to sit in the Oval Office. His lack of impulse control, his inability to take criticism, his 3 a.m. Twitter rants and his seeming failure to prepare for debates all reinforce the doubts the Clinton campaign is raising about his immaturity and temperament.

On the issues Mr. Trump was much better prepared on Sunday, and he kept Mrs. Clinton on the defensive on taxes, ObamaCare and her own ethical problems with her private email server. She isn’t any better than Mr. Trump at apologizing, and we’ll bet Mrs. Clinton doesn’t try citing Abraham Lincoln again as a defense of her private versus public persona. Mr. Trump’s riposte about “Honest Abe” exposed the falsity of that answer.

The Trump campaign should be throwing thank-you bouquets at Hillary’s minions for unearthing an 11-year-old video of the businessman speaking raunchily about women to Hollywood Access host Billy Bush. Why?

1. It demonstrates the sheer panic the Hillary campaign is in at the devolving internal-poll numbers that show the ailing candidate barely keeping her [involuntarily] bobbling chin above the water line of decisive failure.

2. It highlights the startling absence of the MIA candidate, who has not been seen since a campaign appearance in Ohio on October 3, leaving surrogates to speak in her stead. This strange absence, just weeks away from the vote for president, tends to confirm the suspicion that Hillary’s frequent symptoms of illness––spasmodic coughing fits, seizure-like head jerking, inability to ascend stairs without men gripping her arms, a left eye that turns involuntarily inward, episodes of freezing in mid-sentence––utterly disqualify her from the office she seeks, which demands top-notch physical strength and mental acuity.

3. Speaking of acuity, we already know that Hillary’s judgement is gravely impaired. Who else uses private servers that are sieves for our national security secrets; lies repeatedly and compulsively to camouflage her disastrous foray into Benghazi; was a central player in facilitating a deal, through the Clinton Foundation slush fund, that gave Vladmir Putin overwhelming control over the global uranium supply chain; and who chooses Sen. Tim Kaine as a running mate?

Kaine is a man who writer Scott McKay describes in “The Kaine Scrutiny” as:

…having “a history of anti-American radical leftism…for nearly 40 years,”

…being a friend and ardent follower of “a violent Communist lunatic…”

…having a “complete lack of business or private-sector experience…[having] never signed the front of a check”

…being a typical phony liberal who on the one hand apologizes for slavery and then institutes a Project Exile program which led to the “mass incarceration of a disproportionately black cohort of perpetrators”

…having “a history of selling himself out to the Muslim Brotherhood,” which has poured huge money into his coffers

…bringing “the stench of corruption with him, something that seems inescapable with any Clinton minion”