We are living in interesting times, to say the least.

The person who is the presumptive Republican nominee for president is the one who was likely number seventeen out of seventeen preferred by Republicans when this presidential campaign began.  Trump's announcement of last June seemed like comedy, thoroughly unserious.  Within a few weeks, it became clear that at least Trump was serious about running, even though the brightest minds of punditry gave him zero chance of remaining in the race, let alone winding up as the nominee.  Many of the highest-paid analysts in the business are eating lots and lots of crow.  No one knows at this point whether or not the pundits who have proclaimed him unelectable and that Clinton will win in a landslide will choke on all that crow.  But the prospect of either Clinton or Trump in the White House is chilling.  The Constitution means little or nothing to either of them.

But here we are.  Trump is going to be the nominee barring some black swan event.  What is so astonishing is the hypocrisy of the left, who were so defensive of Bill Clinton's sexual exploits and perversions, so quick to call them irrelevant to his character and ability to govern.  They are the same people who are now so, so offended by Trump's "treatment of women"  throughout years past.

The NYT is over the moon at getting a few women on record saying he was sexist or misogynist or whatever.   Predictably, the NYT is giddy at printing anything it can that Trump may have uttered to or about a woman over the past thirty years.  Did he say and do stupid, silly things, indefensible things?  Of course he did.  He is, after all, a reality show guy.  Was he a cad?  It certainly seems so.  Is Trump a cad of Clintonian proportions?  Not even close.  Clinton was a serial philanderer and a serial abuser.  Hillary's job was to make certain none of those women's accusations stuck.  They didn't stick then.  The House impeached him, but the Senate had a crisis of confidence and let him skate.  That was a mistake.  Had the man been impeached for lying under oath, the country might have righted itself.  Instead, middle-schoolers believe that oral sex is not sex, and now, thanks to Obama, the "comfort" of "transgender" students is suddenly mandated to be a top national priority for all schools.  Other "rights" – women's, children's privacy – are suddenly relegated to the end of the line.  Do those students really want to be singled out, given permission to parade their genitals in the locker rooms of the opposite sex?  I think not.  As Danusha Goska wrote on this site last week, these young people are being used.  The Obama administration does not care about them for one moment.  They are a shiny lure in the tackle box for promoting "gender fluidity." 

In the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a woman I was meeting for the first time said to me about Bill Clinton, "Don't you just love him for getting away with it all?"  I was appalled and speechless, naive at the time.  How could a woman who expected to be treated with respect by men in her own life, and she most certainly did, celebrate Bill Clinton's obvious simultaneous promiscuous affection and disdain for women, not the least of them his wife?  Nina Burleigh, a journalist for Time and Mirabella magazine, wrote at the time, "I think American women should be lining up with their Nina Loves Clinton presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs."

Burleigh  is still a crude and intolerant woman of the left.  A year ago on the Lawrence O'Donnell show, she "joked" that "Republicans who defended [Governor Mike] Pence and Indiana's Religious Freedom Act were experiencing 'premature intolerance ejaculation.'"  But it is the left today that is more intolerant than ever before in our nation's history.  Leftists are fiercely illiberal when it comes to  religious people, conservatives, and especially those who revere the Constitution.  Their animus for Ted Cruz was about all of those things.  The left has become hysterically tyrannical, anxious to destroy every single Judeo-Christian value by which the country was founded and lived by for nearly two hundred years.  They seem frantic to close the deal as harshly as possible.  (See Harvard professor Mark Tushnet's  ghastly opinion here.) 

Lanny Davis, the most sycophantic supporter of the Clintons over the past twenty years, is wondering where the six million dollars Trump claimed to raise for the veterans went.  Good question.  We would all like to know.  Trump is not saying.  But what kind of moral blindness does it take to go after Trump for a six-million-dollar lie when the Clintons have taken hundreds of millions of dollars for pay-to-play access?  Two hundred million alone from Gulf nations!  Could it be they have paid her to stop fracking when she becomes president? 

The NYT, as usual, will do whatever it can to promote the Clintons no matter how egregious or criminal their behavior.  Like the Washington Post, they have a clear agenda:  elect the Democrat.  Occasionally, facts seep onto their pages unadulterated, but, like the hit piece on Trump and the women he has known, their above-the-fold "news" stories are almost always meant to deceive and/or generate a 24-hour news cycle.  This one did – a silly news cycle intended to undermine Trump, as if he has not done enough to undermine himself.  It is rather pathetic that the folks at the NYT have not figured out that such overused tricks of their trade are only stiffening the resolve of Trump supporters.

I see trouble on the way.