I was wanting Trump to say that the so-called birther issue is not a racial issue, but instead a constitutional issue. (Debating Watching father of three, Boston sales professional in interview with Lifesette.com)

Hillary has been fooling Americans for so long, I think she really believes we are fools.  You get away with something long enough—you have to construct your own reality to suit your lies. (Boston-area father of two, youth lacrosse coach and mortgage professional, Ibid.)

…  What about Benghazi? None of that came up. (A New York mother of two sons, married to a veteran, Ibid.)

I came across the above quoted remarks thanks to a friend who was also quoted in the article from which they are drawn. In his comment my friend observed that it’s not enough to “focus on the intriguing personalities of the two major presidential candidates… an effort has to be made to go beyond bombast to…look deeper at the issues and values that each candidate represents…. Look at the party platforms…”

I was struck by the common sense, perspicacity and good nature of my friend’s remarks, and indeed those of all of the people featured in the article.  But I found myself pondering the probably unintended nuances lurking in the overtones of the word “intriguing”, which my friend used to describe both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. These days it’s main definition refers to something that’s curious or interesting in some compelling way. But in the course of human experience its connection with “intrigue” in the sense of a plot or stratagem was more prominent, so it had overtones of deceit and trickery.

Whether its Hillary Clinton’s strained efforts to explain away the disappearance of thousands of emails from a personal server (on which she stored classified information in violation of strict rules she was bound by law to observe); or Donald Trump’s reliance in court on the notion that false statements made to boost profits from ventures like Trump University are just routine “sales puffery”, a pall of lies hangs about this year’s presidential contenders like Pigpen’s aura in the “Peanuts” cartoons.

This sad circumstance came to mind because my friend advised people to “look at the party platforms.”  In recent memory the GOP platforms have been treated with the lax regard for truth Trump’s lawyer’s defend as “sales puffery.” They contain lots of lip-service to principles and policies that ring true to GOP’s constituents.  But in practice, the people elected to office act with little or no regard for them.

On the other hand, the Democrats’ platform rings false to the common sense the people quoted in the article express, and to the common good of the American people, but it accurately reflects the spendthrift, tax and debt addicted expansion of the Federal government both the so-called major have collaborated to continue, whatever it costs the people of the United States.  Meanwhile, the Democrats hurry to abandon all respect for the “laws of nature and of Nature’s God”, on which the right, rights and true jurisprudence of our self-government depend, including our authority, as a people, to ordain and establish the Constitution of government for our country. Here again, the GOP platform sounds right.  But the GOP’s quisling leaders tacitly or actively acquiesce in the judicial and executive abuses that are the natural offspring of banishing God’s authority, evoked as the cause of our liberty in the American Declaration of Independence.

Donald Trump’s supporters may think he means to break this pattern of quisling acquiescence.  But there he is, in the debate, tacitly accepting the false notion that the questions raised about Obama’s eligibility are simply about race or proper documentation. In fact, as the viewer quoted above pointed out, they involve fundamental Constitutional questions, including the God-endowed source of our right to govern ourselves (hence the phrase, “natural born citizen”, which requires that we look to the standard of natural rather than man-made law, to determine someone’s eligibility for the office of President.)

As I pointed out in an article published earlier this week, Trump also gave Hillary Clinton a pass on the tangled skein of quite possibly treasonous policy that produced the tragedy at the US facility in Benghazi.  Aside from its damaging implications for the war effort against Jihadi terrorism, a quite possibly treasonous pall hangs over that fatal episode.  Was it the Obama administration’s policy to give aid and comfort to our nation’s enemies in al-Qaeda?  Was Hillary Clinton aware of such policies when she helped to promote a false narrative of what supposedly led to the attack on the facility?

Instead of being taken in by the gossipy confrontations presently being substituted for any serious discussion of such ominous questions, we need to examine the real difference, if any, between a candidate who loyally served Obama’s anti-American so-called “national security’ policy, and her opponent, who used to lavish unequivocal praise on her abilities.  Sure, their words sound differently in this way and that.  To paraphrase the debate viewer, they have each constructed their own reality to suit their lies. But what rational person would trust the words of people such as their records suggest them to be?  Though saying so puts me a little at odds with my friend, the issue is not what words these candidates deploy, in their platforms or their debates. The issue is whether common sense and reason permit us to trust them.