“[W]e should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good.” —John Adams (1797)

Four weeks from today, we will finally know the outcome of the most absurd and deeply troubling presidential campaign in the history of our nation. This is a contest between two profoundly flawed candidates, and it is therefore both a condemnation of our current national political process and a harbinger of dark days ahead.

Despite some enthusiastic Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump supporters, an informal survey of companies that produce campaign bumper stickers and yard signs indicates relatively few Americans are inclined to advertise their support for either Clinton or Trump in their yards or on their vehicles.

Can you blame them?

The majority of Clinton voters view her like most Trump voters view him: “the least of two evils.” Unbowed by her long record of malfeasance and abject corruption, she used lies and deception to narrowly defeat a fringe socialist septuagenarian opponent, Bernie Sanders. Since then, she’s played every divisive card in the Demo deck to build back her base, including deploying Al “Jazeera” Gore this week to win back some of Sanders’ youthful and naïve supporters.

Lies and deception are her trademark, and she is a master.

It was 20 years ago, when she was “co-president” with Bill Clinton, that Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist William Safire tagged her as a “congenital liar,” noting, “She is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.” The only thing that’s changed in the last two decades is that Clinton has become much more proficient at lying to achieve her goals and to advance her elitist statist agenda.

Now, Clinton, with plenty of help from her adoring leftmedia propagandists, is swamping Trump in an endless loop of political polls. But make no mistake: Her support isn’t borne of affection; it’s the by-product of her opponent’s self-inflicted wounds and record-high negatives. (Donald, before you become completely “unshackled,” please relinquish control of your social media accounts to an adult, and find your shut-up switch.)

Over the last 16 election cycles for which we have accurate polling data, only once has a candidate trailing in popular polls a week before the election won both the popular and Electoral College votes in that election — and that, of course, was Ronald Wilson Reagan, who handily defeated the hapless Jimmy Carter in 1980. It’s worth noting that in that election, Reagan had a four-point deficit to overcome, and only 4.3% of votes were cast early. In 2012, 35% of all votes were cast early.

I caution, however, to be careful to not read too much into the leftmedia “pollaganda effect,” which floods media consumers with outcome-based poll results to advance a particular bias, and the resulting “bandwagon effect” propagating that bias. Caveat emptor, fellow Patriots. After all, the only poll that counts is the one on Election Day.

As for this week’s second presidential debate, the real winner was Clinton’s media machine, which forced Trump to use the debate as a placeholder rather than a means of closing the gap.

They managed to do so by releasing, two days before the debate, a decade-old recording of Trump making vulgar references toward certain Hollywood femme fatales — not that anyone assumes such comments would be out of character for Trump today. This was red meat for the notoriously foul-mouthed Hillary Clinton. (Oh, did her media forget to mention the numerous instances of her unbridled profanity, including Secret Service accounts?)

In the debate, Trump deflected the reference to his lewd remarks, saying, “If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse. Mine are words, and his was action. … There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women. … Bill Clinton was abusive to women. Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.”

He’s right, of course. Not since JFK has our nation had a more tireless debaucher of women than Hillary Clinton’s meal-ticket husband.

While Clinton’s media minions feign apoplexy over Trump’s comments, their collective silence about her attacks against Bill Clinton’s numerous rape and assault victims is deafening.

Just before Sunday’s “town hall debate,” Trump hosted a press conference with some of Clinton’s more notable victims – Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick. Hillary, viciously defamed each of them when the original charges surfaced, in order to protect her own political aspirations. Indeed, nobody would ever have heard of “Hillary Rodham” if Bill Clinton hadn’t brung her to the dance.

“Slick Willie” was impeached in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice after falsely insisting that he “did not have sexual relations” with a 22-year-old female White House intern. But recall that once Monica Lewinsky produced DNA evidence of the affair, Hillary assailed her character and infamously claimed that the scandal was fabricated by “a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

Joining Jones, Willey and Broaddrick at Trump’s press conference was Kathy Shelton, who, as a 12-year-old, was raped by a 42-year-old drifter. Hillary Clinton defended Ms. Shelton’s rapist, and Clinton was later caught on tape laughing about how her client had passed a polygraph even though she knew he was guilty. (What, the MSM has not mentioned that?)

Earlier this year, Clinton brazenly declared, “To every survivor of sexual assault … you have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.”

Really, Hillary? Are you really “with” Juanita Broaddrick?

Shelton says, “Hillary put me through something that you would never put a 12-year-old through. And she says she’s for women and children.”

Not only is Hillary a consummate hypocrite, but here is the broader point: Every woman who voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and who is now supporting Hillary, personifies the very definition of hypocrisy. In fact, in 1996 Bill Clinton’s gender differential was 54% women to 43% men, and the only other president to get a higher percentage of votes from women was Barack Obama, who received 56% of the female vote in 2008.

Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald writes in Trumped-Up Outrage, “The sudden onset of Victorian vapors among the liberal intelligentsia and political class at the revelation of Trump’s locker-room talk is part and parcel of the left’s hypocrisy when it comes to feminism and sexual liberation.”

As for Trump’s “locker room talk,” it wasn’t just Democrat Party hacks who feigned being appalled. Prior to the debate, House Speaker Paul Ryan tempered his endorsement of Trump, giving Republicans in marginal districts license to free themselves from the liability at the top of the ticket. Ryan was roundly criticized by members of his own caucus, though, and the RNC, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and others are sticking with Trump.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican turncoat who long ago threw in with Obama, offered a rather caustic assessment of both Clintons, which came to light after his email was hacked: “I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect. A 70-year-old person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still [redacted] bimbos at home.”

All that being said, we should brace ourselves. There is surely more Trump dirt, true or not, to come, like yesterday’s “revelation” in a USA Today hit piece about a handful of lawsuits against Trump and his companies for gender discrimination over the last 40 years.

Allow me to offer a final observation about the banter between Clinton and Trump in round two…

Trump said, “If I win, I’m going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception.” Clinton responded, “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country.”

Then came Trump’s best line of the night: “Because you’d be in jail.”

I note this because in the after-action rhetoric, Democrat operatives accused Trump of acting like a third-world banana republic dictator. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, declared, “It’s chilling that Donald Trump thinks that the presidency is like some banana republic dictatorship where you can lock up your political opponents.”

But in fact, Hillary Clinton and Obama have demonstrated their propensity for dictatorship by assuming not only that they’re the sole arbiters of the law but that they’re also above it.

Clinton recently declared, “I want to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the way the world really works” — meaning those who’ll do her bidding rather than abide by their obligation to render opinion based on constitutional Rule of Law. And in one of her secret big money Wall Street donor meetings, Clinton declared, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

No Constitution, no borders, no country.

That on top of Clinton’s political platform: Leftist Supreme Court justices who rule on judicial diktat, bigger government, more regulations, higher taxes, extending Obama’s failed economic and feckless foreign policies, using executive fiat to erode the First and Second Amendment, single-payer health care and unmitigated corruption.

This is a very difficult election season, but this should not be a difficult election choice between corrosive Clinton and the Trump-Pence ticket.

However, if Trump maintains his current trajectory, Republicans will not only lose the presidency, but he may take down the majorities won in the historic 2014 midterm election — the Senate being the last gauntlet between our Constitution and an outlaw executive and judicial branch.

Those of us who are military families — who have blood on the line — consider the outcome of this election with an extra measure of concern.

Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis