You can say whatever you want about the moral shortcomings of Donald Trump. We’ve said plenty here at The Hayride, and we stand by all of it.

But the Republican nominee got himself in trouble this week because he supposedly suggested that the “2nd Amendment people” might want to assassinate Hillary Clinton in retaliation for her coming attempts at Australian-style gun confiscation.

Trump denied he made any such suggestion, and said that what he meant was that the “2nd Amendment people” would engage in political activism that would stop Clinton, not that they would shoot her.

It wasn’t one of his finer moments, but it set off leftist media outlets to paroxysms of outrage and demands that Trump leave the race.

None of those outlets seemed to remember how Democrats fantasized for eight years about killing George W. Bush. Plays were written about that fantasy.

And now, Clinton has taken her turn at suggesting the country would be better off with her opponent dead. She brought up the estate tax, and casually discussed how if the federal government was able to steal some four billion dollars Trump would be able to leave to his kids rather than the IRS it would be so much better for the economy.

Who’s worse here?

What Trump said was politically dumb because it could be interpreted in a way he didn’t mean, at least if you give credence to his explanation after the fact. What about what Clinton said? First she kills Trump off without even so much as a nod to his current existence, and then she moves right into a discussion of how his wealth doesn’t belong to him or his family because sending veterans to college or subsidizing urban political machines would suit her better.

Trump says lots of things that brand him as a demagogue and a son of a bitch. Many of them are careless and stupid, and Trump is frightening because he’s unpredictable and grossly ignorant on policy. But what Hillary says isn’t careless and stupid, it’s carefully crafted. And it’s monstrous.

She’s hostile to private property, she’s hostile to gun ownership, she’s hostile to the sanctity of life. Who would choose to be governed by such a person?

Our position is that neither are fit for the presidency. One of them is going to have the job. It’s crucial we protect ourselves from the winner. We need an Article 5 convention as soon as possible to draft constitutional amendments draining power from Washington. If we are to have a president unfit for the job that president must have far less power than the current unfit president has over our lives.

 

 – Speaking of the current unfit president, this week at Commentary Magazine there was a story by Rick Richman giving a very plausible – and we think likely correct – explanation for why Obama sent $400 million in cash to Iran rather than a simple wire transfer…

Why did the Obama administration make its $400 million payment to Iran on January 17 in untraceable foreign currency and then not only fail to disclose that the payment had been made in cash but withhold that information from Senator Tom Cotton in response to his repeated inquiries about it? According to both former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former Treasury terrorism finance analyst Jonathan Schanzer, President Obama could have paid Iran legally in a conventional banking transaction rather than cash. The administration disclosed the amount of the payment in its January 17 announcement of the deal, but not that it had been made in cash.

The reason for both the use of cash and the effort to hide its use may well relate to Hezbollah–Iran’s wholly-owned terrorist proxy in Lebanon–and to the “Hizballah International Financing Prevention Act of 2015” (“HIFPA”), which was enacted by Congress one month before the cash payment. HIFPA helps explain (a) why Iran wanted $400 million in cash and why it needed it in January and (b) why the administration did not want to disclose its cash payment to Congress.

As of 2015, Iran’s annual funding of Hezbollah was $200 million per year (in addition to weapons, training, intelligence, and logistical assistance), according to the testimony of Matthew Levitt, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in a September 17, 2015, Congressional hearing. He told Congress that, as a result of the then-pending Iran deal, “Hezbollah is about to take a place of even greater prominence within the planning of Iran’s revolutionary elite,” and that with the coming sanctions relief for Iran:

Hezbollah expects additional funds will come its way… A newly enriched Hezbollah would be more aggressive at home and abroad, challenging less-militant parties across the Lebanese political spectrum and boosting its destabilizing activities outside of Lebanon.

Enacted three months later, HIFPA set forth a policy to use “all available diplomatic, legislative, and executive avenues… to block [Hezbollah’s] ability to fund its global terrorist activities.” The new law barred any foreign bank from access to the American financial system if it facilitated a significant transaction for Hezbollah. On December 18, 2015, President Obama signed the legislation into law.

It wasn’t until April of this year that the Treasury Department put forth its regulations to enforce HIFPA, but like Richman says everyone involved saw this coming in advance – and as a result, the banks in Lebanon cut all ties with Hezbollah.

Which meant that Iran would have had a tough time getting Hezbollah funded at the normal $200 million per year. That much cash in currencies anybody would want isn’t quite so easy to come by, particularly in that part of the world. So for the Iranians, this is a stone to kill two birds – $400 million gets Hezbollah funded for two solid years, and without engendering economic blowback inside Hezbollah’s base in Lebanon.

There’s a term for all this, and that term is “material support for terrorism.” Which is precisely what Iransom was. Barack Obama will have the blood of Hezbollah’s victims on his hands for his having paid that $400 million to the worst people on earth.

 – Kurt Schlichter had an outrageously funny Townhall column remembering a couple of outrageously funny Hollywood comedies of the late 1970’s – The Bad News Bears and Animal House – and how anti-establishment films enriched American culture. Those days are largely gone now, because the old anti-establishment types are now the establishment, and it’s probably the Trump people who are currently the outsiders and underdogs…

Basically, when outsider Hollywood became the insiders, it abandoned the people it used to champion and became everything stuffy and conceited that it pretended to despise. These hacks didn’t just sell out – they aggressively marketed their souls to the highest bidder. Everything they ever pretended to believe about standing with the little guy against the establishment was a lie; they were just biding their time until the establishment’s invitations arrived at their waterfront Malibu estates and they could start wielding the frat paddle.

And Hillary? She’s the sorority mean girl, a frosty, neurotic, mid-western over-achiever whose freaky daddy issues compelled her to marry a guy who treated her with the same contempt as Pops. She’s the bitter, striving, hard-four Mandy Pepperidge who hooked up with a cleaned-up Bluto because she knew he was going places, but then finally broke him and forced him to become a vegan.

Bill Clinton absolutely understood the outsiders back in his prime, but Hillary would, thankfully, never be caught dead at a toga party. Such frivolity offers nothing that she could use in her quest for whatever objective she thinks will finally fill the void in her blighted soul. At best, she is headed for [SPOILER] a victory as ultimately empty as Vic Morrow’s in TBNB. At worst, she might follow fellow D.C. corruptocrat Greg Marmalard to prison.

You can absolutely see Trump as Coach Buttermaker from The Bad News Bears, can’t you?

 – Finally, a Today’s Last Thing. It’s an Olympic Today’s Last Thing, and one which our pal Oscar would get a kick out of. Specifically, it appears the Olympic golf course has a bevy of additional spectators which, in the parlance of a different late 1970’s-early 1980’s anti-establishment Hollywood comedy, would qualify as “varmints.”

Wildlife is taking over the Olympic golf course just before the sport makes its official comeback to the Games after 112 years.

Capybaras have been seen exploring and settling in on the green, in sand traps and near water hazards, according to The National Post.

The animal, native to South America, is a semi-aquatic rodent that can weigh up to 100 pounds and can stand about 2 feet tall. It’s the largest rodent in the world.

If you’re thinking “nutria on steroids,” yes.

“They chew down on the grass at night,” Mark Johnson, director of international agronomy for the PGA Tour told The National Post. “There are about 30-40 of them inside the course perimeter, but they live here and we play golf here, we co-exist.”

Golfers set to take part don’t seem to be too fazed — at least not yet. Several have stopped to take photos of the rodents during their practice rounds.

Here are some of those photos, as collected by the Wall Street Journal…

And here’s the guy they needed in Rio, but he was of course nowhere to be found…