Hillary Clinton was serving as the United States Secretary of State in 2011 when word came of Muammar Kaddafi’s bloody lynching by a Libyan mob. The death followed upon the heels of Madame Secretary’s visit to Libya. That prompted her to laugh. She boasted to reporters: “We came, we saw, he died.”

History does not record the reaction of President Harry Truman to the death by suicide of Hitler. Nor that of President Eisenhower when told that Stalin had just died in the Kremlin. Both presidents, we may assume, took care not to be seen gloating even in the death of an enemy.

That ugly Hillary scene should give us pause. What kind of person greets the killing of even a very bad man with such chortling? [I say this as one whose college friend was among those murdered by Kaddafi in the bombing of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.] There is something fundamentally rotten in a person who laughs at murder.

We already know that this woman is fundamentally corrupt. An excellent Washington Examiner column by Tim Carney concisely makes the case for the crooked operation that is the Clinton machine.

Cruel and corrupt, she is also a discredit to womanhood. She is the worst woman to be our first woman president. She has covered up and excused her husband’s goatish conduct for decades. Without apologizing to that “vast right wing conspiracy” she falsely blamed for the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, she admitted to being the last of 150 million women to figure out that Bill was lying. There is probably no other liberal Democratic woman in Congress who would put up with her husband’s womanizing.

But she does so because he smoothes her path to power.

Reject her.

A historian friend challenges my characterization of Trump as the worst man to run for president. Worse than Aaron Burr? At least Trump has not shot a political opponent to death in a duel, as Burr did Alexander Hamilton. At least Trump has not tried to detach the Western U.S. from the rest of the country, as Burr did.

Give him time, I say. We already know that Trump is thoroughly corrupt. Like Burr, he will “laugh up his sleeve at any deal he makes with you.” That was Hamilton’s warning to Federalists who thought they could help Burr slip past his running mate Thomas Jefferson into the White House.

Trump is now attacking Hillary Clinton. He was a Clinton donor for years. He thought she’d be a “terrific” secretary of state. He bribed her repeatedly, he says. He wanted her to show up at his third wedding and to bring her sexual predator husband. They would stand next to Trump and his latest “Hottie” wife. Trump would then introduce Bill Clinton to his own daughter. She is so alluring, he says, that he would chamber her himself if it were not for rules on incest. But he had no problem letting predator Bill sidle up to her.

This is the man who tells us he’d surround himself with the “best people.” The Wall Street Journal in this report exposed Trump’s “Goodfella” pals. Trump told the Journal he didn’t know those associates were Mob-controlled. Amazing. He also tells us he’s “really smart.” Mr. Really Smart was the last of 19.5 million New Yorkers who did not know the Mob runs cement contracting in the City.

Trump has stirred the cauldron for every crazed conspiracy theorist in the country. He is the darling of what Theodore Roosevelt playfully labeled “the lunatic fringe.” He fails what I have called The Alamogordo Test for Presidential Candidates. Americans are too sensible to entrust such a loon with nuclear weapons.

Reject him.

We must have an honorable alternative to these two odious candidates. The nomination system of the two parties is the result of Nixon’s schemes and McGovern’s dreams. It has worn about as well as bell-bottoms and mood rings. It has obviously broken down.

But the Constitution stands. We can put before the American people a candidate who can command support from conservatives, moderates, and independents, and even gain a measure of respect from liberals. The Founders created the Electoral College for just such an emergency.

An independent candidate would gain massive publicity and strong support from millions of Americans who yearn for a third choice. Columnist Jim Glassman shows that, by 2-1, Americans  desperately want another choice in November.

An independent candidate is also the only way to keep Republicans from being wiped out in down-ballot races this fall. Even those Vichy Republicans who have bowed to Trump’s “inevitability” may soon be crying out for an honorable alternative. Let’s give those millions a reason to come out to vote.