Only the Clintons can protect our moral values.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

“Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life,” President Clinton whined.

It was the late hot summer of ’98 and the man dubbed “Slick Willie,” the nickname he claimed to dislike the most, was facing the prospect of becoming the first president to be successfully impeached.

These days the Clintons seem to have changed their minds about whether presidents should have private lives that ought to be pried into. So did the media, which back then insisted that it was “just sex,” but has belatedly decided that a president’s sexual conduct ought to be subject to scrutiny after all. But then again double standards are its stock in trade. They always have been.

Bill’s bedroom is off limits, but Trump’s isn’t.

Unable to run on national security, the Clintons want to run on the same subject that they once eschewed. And they want Trump’s sex life to be up for public debate, but not Bill’s.

The media has joined in this chorus which insists that when Trump mentions Bill’s rapes, he’s climbing into the “gutter,” but that when Hillary references Trump’s tape, she’s taking the “high ground.”

How can the same subject be both the gutter and the high ground? It’s either one or the other.

Meanwhile the clock to the next Islamic terror attack goes on ticking.

Back in ‘98 Bill Clinton complained, “Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time, in fact, it is past time to move on,” he added. “We have important work to do – real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.”

These days the Clintons don’t want to move on. They want to discuss the Trump tape as often as possible. Why? Because they don’t want to deal with what the Clintons did move on to.

Hours before 9⁄ 11 , Bill Clinton was giving a speech in Australia and boasted that he could have gotten Osama bin Laden, but chose not to because of the collateral damage in Kandahar.

“I nearly got him. And I could have killed him,” he admitted.

The planned airstrike had been vetoed in late December ’98. Congress had postponed debate on impeachment a few days earlier to allow Bill Clinton to bomb Iraq in peace. The raids accomplished little except to distract from the impeachment debate and from his refusal to take out Osama bin Laden.

Americans watching every salacious detail of the Lewinsky affair laid out for them were focusing on the wrong thing. In early August, Al Qaeda had carried out the bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. This attack was a major signpost on the road to 9⁄ 11 . But like the World Trade Center bombing and the Benghazi attack, the Clintons had miserably failed in the face of Islamic terror.

Back in ’98, Bill Clinton insisted that his sex life didn’t matter compared to “security matters.” Now the Clintons would like us to believe that Trump’s sex life matters more than ISIS.

The Clintons have cost the lives of thousands of Americans and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world with their approach to “security matters.” The real question may be how many more lives, especially American lives, their way of doing things will cost.

Hillary Clinton is determined to dump massive numbers of Syrian Muslim migrants in this country despite the terror risk. She has doubled down on the destructive policies that led to the rise of ISIS.

It’s not hard to imagine a speech by yet another President Clinton discussing how she could have gotten the man behind the next Islamic terror threat, but chose not to do anything.

The question is whether voters can take the time to look past the flood of salacious material in the media. Europe has seen a wave of major attacks. It’s only a matter of time until an attack on a larger scale than the Pulse massacre in Florida, in which an ISIS Muslim killed 49 people, takes place.

Despite their ugly past, the Clintons have decided to run for a third term on their record as moral paragons. Hillary’s Role Models ad urged voters to protect their children from the bad influence of a President Trump. “Our children are watching. What example will we set for them?” it asked.

At the second debate, she also warned that our children were watching.

Hillary’s concern for what children watch politicians do on television is a little belated. It wasn’t that long ago that parents were sending their children out of the room when Bill’s affairs were being discussed.

And these days they are again.

Hillary would have as much luck running on her honesty or foreign policy track record as on being a role model for the children. Having the Clintons as role models for children should be considered child abuse.

But Bill Clinton was just doing his best JFK impression. And compared to the antics of the Kennedys, he looked like a saint. At least we don’t know of a single woman whom he actually murdered.

And here was Ted Kennedy at his best. “The six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair… Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers.”

This wasn’t talk on a tape. It happened. And Ted went on to be praised as a champion of women’s rights.

It’s a little bizarre that at this late date, the Democrats have decided to become the guardians of our moral values. Or that the Clintons of all people would try to fill those shoes.

But discussing Trump’s tape is a nice distraction from addressing the role that Hillary’s support for the Arab Spring played in the rise of ISIS, the mass kidnapping and rape of Yazidi women by Islamic Jihadists, the mass sexual assaults against women in Germany perpetrated by Muslim refugees, including those from Hillary’s Arab Spring, and the men and women who died here on September 11.

Back in ’98, Bill Clinton claimed that his personal life had to be off limits so that he could protect our national life. He got what he wanted and he failed to protect our national life. Having abandoned any sense of responsibility to our national life, the Clintons want to talk about the values of personal life.

But if voters want paragons of morality in personal life, why would they turn to the Clintons? And if they want someone to protect the national life, why would they turn to the Clintons?