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I'm perfectly willing to admit that in his relations with women, Donald Trump is a cad and a rake. I'll even go so far as to say he's a bounder.

Now can we get back to the issues?

The most important such issue in was almost entirely overlooked last week. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a Russian lawmaker who is close to Vladimir Putin, warned that if Hillary Clinton is elected president there will be a war between the U.S. and Russia.

"Americans voting for a president must realize they are voting for peace on planet Earth if they vote for Trump, but if they vote for Hillary, it's war," he said. "There will be Hiroshimas and Nagasakis everywhere."

Now that's a real issue. And Clinton brought it into the open with her declaration in the last debate that she would declare a no-fly zone in the part of Syria where Russian planes are flying sorties against the rebels on a daily basis.

Shooting down Russian planes will mean war. But the media ignored that, even though Jill Stein, the presidential candidate of the Green Party, made a similar observation. (Read her quote here about Hillary being the biggest warmonger in the race.)

"On the issue of war and nuclear weapons, it is actually Hillary's policies which are much scarier than Donald Trump who does not want to go to war with Russia," Stein said in an interview. "He wants to seek modes of working together, which is the route that we need to follow not to go into confrontation and nuclear war with Russia."

(Also, former CIA spy Larry Johnson warns the Obama administration seems to be on the way to war against Russia.)

This should be big news. In recent history it's been the Republicans doing the saber-rattling and the Democrats calling for peace. Clinton is reversing that pattern, but the media are giving her a free ride.

Imagine for a moment that in 1980 Ronald Reagan had proposed shooting down Russian planes over a faraway country where Moscow had a military base, Poland for example.

Would he not have been declared a crazed warmonger by every member of the media?

This is the sort of issue we should be discussing at the moment. Instead we're discussing the accusations by several women that Trump tried to force himself on them.

That may make for great internet traffic, but it has little relevance to his ability to govern.

If you doubt that, consider the behavior of Hillary's husband Bill. We now know he behaved toward women in a manner remarkably similar to the way in which Trump is accused of behaving. But that didn't stop him from presiding over eight years during which we had a solid economy and no major wars.

And when you look back at the news coverage of that 1992 campaign, you see the media went out of their way to minimize that behavior. At the height of the controversy, Flowers played for reporters tapes of phone conversations with Clinton in which he gave her advice for answering questions from the media such as "All you got to do is deny it," and "if they ever hit you with it, just say no, and go on."

Whatever "it" was, Clinton got the benefit of the doubt. Even Eleanor Clift of Newsweek, a liberal commentator if there ever was one, wrote at the time, "Truth is, the press is willing to cut Clinton some slack because they like him -- and what he has to say."

They cut him enough slack so that he made it through the Democratic primaries even though his campaign had to have what deputy campaign manager Betsey Wright termed a "bimbo patrol."

As patrol leader, Wright said "there are a lot of women who seem to think that it's OK to completely fabricate lies and try to make fame and fortune at the expense of this man."

Sound familiar?

But that wasn't big news back them.

And it shouldn't have been. As the example of Gary Hart had shown in the prior cycle, so many politicians have secret sex lives that it's almost unsporting to pick on the rare few who happen to be outed.

The reporters mainly stuck to the real issues of foreign and domestic policy. But the standard of journalism in America has declined greatly in the internet era. That proposed no-fly zone is a perfect example. I had to go to the British press to find a realistic assessment of its implications.

"Proposing a no-fly zone not only risks greater catastrophe for the people of Aleppo," wrote the Guardian's Jonathon Steele. "It threatens to engulf us all."

It does indeed.

But let's talk about what Trump said on a TV show 11 years ago instead.

Oh yeah, let's start rehabbing those old fallout shelters from the 1960s, too.

UPDATE: Try to figure out when she was lying. Sunday's New York Times has an article in which Hillary is quoted as saying she opposes a no-fly zone - in a heretofore secret talk to Wall Street insiders:

Mrs. Clinton presented the Pentagon's argument against establishing a no-fly zone in Syria, a policy that she has advocated in her 2016 campaign. Noting that American pilots would have to enforce the no-fly zone, she said, "We're not putting our pilots at risk," and added, "You're going to kill a lot of Syrians."

ALSO -POLITIFICTION FROM THE POST: These so-called "fact-checking" sites are losing all credibility, especially when associated with the Washington Post, which is clearly in the tank for Hillary Clinton.

Check this entry in which the Post writers start with a quote released by WIkileaks in which Clinton clearly states that she favors "open borders" of the "common-market style."

Such borders in the common market, also known as the European Union, are truly open. You can go from France to Germany as easy as you can go from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

Here's the full quote (Italics mine):

"My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere."

Note that this statement was made in what Clinton presumed was privacy. We can therefore assume she meant to get this message across to the listeners.

Yet the Post writers then check it against her public statements, which are obviously going to reflect her appeal for votes rather than her true feelings.

Unbelievably, the Post writers then go on to report the explanations of various political functionaries loyal to Clinton. They try to spin it as an embrace of environmentalism, which is obvious nonsense.

What they fail to point out is that a true system of open borders would open the only border in the world between a First World nation and a Third World nation, the U.S. and Mexico.

Her goal is entirely unrealistic. If we opened that border, millions of Mexicans would migrate immediately because of the higher pay and better living conditions here.

But she stated in plain English that this is her goal.

Nonetheless, the Post pundits rate as "mostly false" Trump's assertion that when she said "open borders" she meant "open border."

I suspect this is the Politifact entry that finally finished off any pretense of impartiality on the part of the Post.