This news-report will be short but important:

One major-Party U.S. Presidential candidate is so gross that his answer when the radio host Howard Stern said the individual’s daughter is “a piece of a**” was that she has “always been very voluptuous”; his competitor is so warmongering that she says “I am advocating the no-fly zone”, which means that she wants the U.S. to warn Syria and Russia that if they don’t stop flying their warplanes over Syria, the U.S. will shoot down those warplanes. (That’s what a “no-fly zone” means.)

Which of these two candidates presents the bigger likelihood of starting World War III as the U.S. President — of starting a war against Russia?

Which of these two candidates has drawn more media-criticism and lost the more voter-support, as a consequence of these two revelations — the grossness of the one, and the warmongeringness of the other, candidate?

According to current polls, it seems extremely likely that the next President of the U.S. will be announcing a no-fly zone — ordering Syria and Russia to stop bombing ISIS and/or certain other jihadists in Syria (such as Al Qaeda in Syria). What will happen if Russia ignores the warning, and continues bombing all jihadist groups there, including the ones that the U.S. and Sauds have been arming and will be warning Syria and Russia not to bomb? Do U.S. voters care what would happen? Do they even think about what would happen? These Americans are obligated to produce these decisions, but not all of them will do that.

America’s voters will, in fact, be making those decisions, answering those questions, by no later than Election Day, November 8th. But other Americans will abstain, and will simply let the Americans who do participate, make these decisions, which all Americans, and all the world, will have to live with, if not die from. How patriotic will the non-participants — the people who won’t make a choice between the two deplorables — be? How unpatriotic will they be? How intelligent will the non-participants be? How stupid will they be?

Will the people who vote for a third-party candidate — someone who stands no realistic chance of winning even a single one of the 50 states in the Electoral College — belong in the category of Americans who make a choice, or instead in the category of Americans who decline to choose?

Sometimes, news-reporting consists of clarifying what the issues are in an upcoming election. Those are the issues in the current contest for the White House. On the one side is a gross person. On the other side is a warmongering person. The deadline for making this choice will be November 8th.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.