Replies to post #251954 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

LOLOL ____manbaby tells Mr. Kahn that "he's made a lot of sacrifices" by hiring a lot people .. omg! .. you fool! ... But
YOU don't pay them they have to go to court! AND you hire a lot of them from the labor contractors ..
what ? ... 2.00bucks work for a day.. you putz!


such a fool ! somehow he's calls 'hiring workers' making sacrifices.... oh my god .. he doesn't even make any sense ..

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-father-fallen-soldier-ive-made-lot/story?id=41015051

[BOREALIS]

This election isn’t just Democrat vs. Republican. It’s normal vs. abnormal.

Updated by • Ezra Klein • @ezraklein •Jul 28, 2016, 11:29p

What we just witnessed in Cleveland and Philadelphia defies our normal political vocabulary. We are used to speaking of American politics as split between the two major parties. It’s Democrats versus Republicans, liberals versus conservatives, left versus right.

But not this election. The conventions showed that this is something different. This campaign is not merely a choice between the Democratic and Republican parties, but between a normal political party and an abnormal one.

The Democratic Party’s convention was a normal political party’s convention. The party nominated Hillary Clinton, a longtime party member with deep experience in government. Clinton was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, the runner-up in the primary. Barack Obama, the sitting president, spoke in favor of Clinton. Various Democratic luminaries gave speeches endorsing Clinton by name. The assembled speakers criticized the other party’s nominee, arguing that he would be a bad president and should be defeated at the polls.

That isn’t to say that Democrats didn’t show divisions or expose fault lines. They did. Political parties are chaotic things. The Democratic Party’s primary was unusually bitter, and listening to the loud "boos" of Sanders’s most committed supporters, there’s real reason to wonder whether Democrats will fracture in coming years. But for now, the Democrats nominated a normal candidate, held a normal convention, and remain a normal political party.

Republicans held an abnormal convention and nominated an abnormal candidate

The Republican Party’s convention was not a normal political party’s convention. The party nominated Donald Trump, a new member with literally no experience in government. Ted Cruz, the runner-up in the primary, gave a primetime speech in which he refused to endorse Trump, and instead told Americans to "vote your conscience."

The Republican Party’s two living presidents, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, declined to endorse Trump or attend the convention. The party’s previous two presidential nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, declined to endorse Trump or attend the convention. The assembled speakers — including Chris Christie, a prospective attorney general — argued that the other party’s nominee was a criminal who should be thrown in jail.

Even the normal parts of the convention felt abnormal. The prospective first lady’s speech included a passage plagiarized from the Democratic Party’s first lady. Trump counterprogrammed the first night of his own convention by doing a phone interview with Fox News and an hour-long discussion with the Golf Channel. He distracted from his running mate’s acceptance speech by telling the New York Times he would not automatically honor America’s commitments under the NATO treaty. Trump’s speech was enthusiastically endorsed by David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. "Couldn’t have said it better," he tweeted.

Trump’s post-convention was even worse

The strangeness didn’t end with the convention. The next day — the very next day! — Trump gave a press conference in which he said Ted Cruz’s father was likely involved in the assassination of JFK, swore he wouldn’t accept Cruz’s endorsement even if it were offered, and argued that the National Enquirer deserved a Pulitzer Prize. It was one of the strangest and most self-destructive political performances in recent memory. The conservative Weekly Standard was left agog. The Republican Party’s nominee, Stephen Hayes wrote, "is not of sound mind."

Then, befitting the dignity we expect in our presidential aspirants, the Republican Party’s nominee spent his week live-tweeting the Democratic Party’s convention, with deep, thoughtful commentary like:

The invention of email has proven to be a very bad thing for Crooked Hillary in that it has proven her to be both incompetent and a liar!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2016

And:

Elizabeth Warren, often referred to as Pocahontas, just misrepresented me and spoke glowingly about Crooked Hillary, who she always hated!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2016

He followed that up with a press conference at which he blasted the job Tim Kaine had done in … New Jersey? Of course, Kaine was the governor of Virginia. Trump seems to have literally confused the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee with Tom Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey.

Unwilling to stop there, Trump went on to comment on the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, which most experts think was conducted by Russia. "Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are able to find the 33,000 emails that are missing — I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," he said.

Let’s stop there for a second: Donald Trump went out and asked a foreign government to conduct cyber espionage in order to help his campaign. His supporters initially tried to laugh it off as an ad-libbed joke, but then Trump tweeted the same thing. This came only hours after his running mate, Mike Pence, had warned of "serious consequences" if Russia truly was behind the DNC hack.

None of this is normal.

A new cleavage in American politics: normal versus abnormal

America’s main political cleavage is between the Democratic and Republican parties. That split has meant different things at different times, but in recent decades it primarily tracks an ideological disagreement: Democrats are the party of liberal policies; Republicans are the party of conservative policies.

But in this year’s presidential election, the difference is more fundamental than that: The Democratic Party is a normal political party that has nominated a normal presidential candidate, and the Republican Party has become an abnormal political party that has nominated an abnormal presidential candidate.

[...]

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/28/12281222/trump-clinton-conventions

[F6]

Donald Trump Suggests Khizr Khan’s Wife Wasn’t ‘Allowed’ to Speak

By MAGGIE HABERMAN and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
JULY 30, 2016

Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/donald-trump-on-the-issues.html ] belittled the parents of a slain Muslim soldier who had strongly denounced Mr. Trump during the Democratic National Convention, saying that the soldier’s father had delivered the entire speech because his mother was not “allowed” to speak.

Mr. Trump’s comments, in an interview [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-father-fallen-soldier-ive-made-lot/story?id=41015051 ] with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that will air on Sunday, were his most extensive remarks since Khizr Khan delivered on Thursday one of the most powerful speeches [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/us/elections/khizr-humayun-khan-speech.html ] of the convention in Philadelphia. In it, Mr. Khan spoke about how his 27-year-old son, Humayun Khan, an Army captain, sacrificed his life in a car bombing in 2004 in Iraq as he tried to save other troops.

He criticized Mr. Trump, saying he “consistently smears the character of Muslims,” and pointedly challenged what sacrifices Mr. Trump himself had made. Mr. Khan’s wife, Ghazala, stood silently by his side.

Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, told Mr. Stephanopoulos that Mr. Khan seemed like a “nice guy” and that he wished him “the best of luck.” But, he added, “If you look at his wife, she was standing there, she had nothing to say, she probably — maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me.”

The comment implied that she was not allowed to speak because of female subservience that is expected in some traditional strains of Islam. Mr. Trump also told [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/opinion/trumps-thunderbolts.html ] Maureen Dowd of The New York Times on Friday night, “I’d like to hear his wife say something.”

The negative remarks about the mother of a dead soldier drew quick and widespread condemnation, and even given Mr. Trump’s history of retaliating when attacked, they were startling. They called to mind one of his earliest thrusts of the campaign, when he responded to criticism from Senator John McCain of Arizona, once a prisoner of war in Vietnam, by saying at an Iowa forum, “I like people that weren’t captured.”

But Mr. McCain has a long history in the public eye. The Khans, before their convention appearance, had spent no time in the public eye.

In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Khan lashed out at Mr. Trump, saying, “He is devoid of feeling the pain of a mother who has sacrificed her son.”

“Trump is totally void of any decency because he is unaware of how to talk to a Gold Star family and how to speak to a Gold Star mother,” said Mr. Khan, referring to the term for surviving family members of those who died in war.

He said his wife did not talk on Thursday because she finds it too painful to speak about her son’s death. Ms. Khan herself spoke publicly on Friday to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, saying she “cannot even come in the room where his pictures are.”

When she saw her son’s photo on the screen behind her on the stage in Philadelphia, she said, “I couldn’t take it.”

“I controlled myself at that time,” she said. “It is very hard.”

In his interview with The New York Times, Mr. Khan said his wife did help him craft the remarks, and even told him to remove certain attacks he had wanted to make against Mr. Trump.

But on Saturday, he unmuzzled himself.

“Unlike Donald Trump’s wife, I didn’t plagiarize my speech,” Mr. Khan said, referring to how several lines from a Michelle Obama speech found their way into Melania Trump’s address at the Republican convention.

“I also wanted to talk about how he’s had three wives, and yet he talks about others’ ethics and their religion,” Mr. Khan said. “I wanted to say 10 other things about him, and she said, ‘Don’t go to his level. We are paying tribute to our son.’”

Mr. Trump’s comments provoked another avalanche of criticism on social media, and again put Republican leaders in a difficult position, facing fresh demands that they repudiate their presidential nominee.

Even before Mr. Trump’s remarks to ABC News, Mr. Khan had asked that Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker, denounce Mr. Trump.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, said on Saturday he had not seen Mr. Trump’s latest remarks, but referred to Mr. McConnell’s response late last year that a ban on Muslims entering the United States, proposed by Mr. Trump, would be unacceptable. Mr. Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In the same interview, when Mr. Stephanopoulos said that Mr. Khan had pointed out that his family would not have been allowed into the United States under Mr. Trump’s proposed ban, the candidate replied, “He doesn’t know that.”

And when asked what he would say to the grieving father, Mr. Trump replied, “I’d say, ‘We’ve had a lot of problems with radical Islamic terrorism.’”

Mr. Stephanopoulos also noted that Mr. Khan said that Mr. Trump had “sacrificed nothing,” and had lost no one.

“Who wrote that? Did Hillary’s scriptwriters?” Mr. Trump replied. “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I’ve worked very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs.”

Reihan Salam, a conservative writer for National Review and a frequent Trump critic, said that the candidate had an opportunity to declare remorse for the Khans while still holding to his own views as a candidate.

“A more skillful communicator would have avoided comparing his sacrifice to that of a parent who had lost his adult son to violence in Iraq, for the obvious reason that there’s no way to win,” he said. “Instead, he might have asked why Humayun Khan had died in the first place — because of a war that many if not most Americans regard as a tragic blunder, that led to the deaths of thousands of Americans.”

“There was really no benefit for Trump in suggesting that Ghazala Khan had been muzzled, because she could easily come out and say that she had been too grief-stricken to speak, which she did.”

Tim Miller, a former communications director for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, called Mr. Trump’s comments “inhuman.”

Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said on Saturday: “It’s really despicable that anyone, let alone a presidential candidate, would choose to dishonor the service of an American who gave his life for this nation.”

Ms. Khan, he said, “was obviously there to support her husband who was offering what many people believe was the most impactful speech of the entire convention.”

“And you know,” Mr. Hooper said, “to just completely throw that away, what does that say about what Trump would be like as president?”

As is often the case, Mr. Trump, who has had no campaign events this weekend, managed with a few words to upstage his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who was making several stops in Ohio and Pennsylvania with her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia.

“I was very moved to see Ghazala Khan stand bravely and with dignity in support of her son on Thursday,” Mrs. Clinton said Saturday in a relatively reserved statement. “This is a time to honor the sacrifice of Captain Khan and all the fallen.”

In the ABC News interview, Mr. Trump also hedged over whether he would participate in the three scheduled debates with Mrs. Clinton. He insinuated that she had worked to schedule two of the debates during football games so viewership would be lower.

He also said the National Football League had sent him a letter complaining about debate dates.

The debates were scheduled last September by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. And while Joe Lockhart, a spokesman for the National Football League, said the league was not happy about the scheduling, “we did not send a letter to Trump.”

Ken Belson, Matt Flegenheimer and Emmarie Huetteman contributed reporting.

Related Coverage

A Few Simple Truths on Immigration
JULY 30, 2016
Editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/opinion/sunday/a-few-simple-truths-on-immigration.html

In Tribute to Son, Khizr Khan Offered Citizenship Lesson at Convention
JULY 29, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/us/elections/khizr-humayun-khan-speech.html

© 2016 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/us/politics/donald-trump-khizr-khan-wife-ghazala.html [with embedded video]

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