Month: August 2016

 
From Dorian de Wind at The Moderate Voice:

Say whatever you want about John McCain — and I have said plenty — the former Prisoner of War (POW) and war hero is a patriot and a decent man.

He displayed such during the 2008 presidential campaign when a woman at a town hall meeting referred to Obama as an “Arab” and McCain, retaking the microphone, responded “”No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about.”

When Donald Trump derided the former POW for having been captured by the North Vietnamese, John McCain chose to ignore the insult.

This time, however, when Trump insulted the Gold Star parents of a Muslim-American man who gave his life for his country during the Iraq War, and while many Republican leaders stayed silent, Senator John McCain chose to speak out.

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From Infidel753:

Though Khizr Khan’s speech at the Democratic convention was one of the shortest, it’s already emerging as one of the most consequential. Not only because of Khan’s eloquent and heartfelt words — though I’ve watched the speech several times and continue to be impressed by its power — but because Trump has demonstrated more flagrantly than ever that he doesn’t know how to respond effectively when he feels provoked.

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From Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

The inexplicable feud that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has elected to escalate with the parents of the late Captain Humayun Khan, a Muslim soldier who was killed in Iraq, continued to unfold Sunday morning, as Khizr Khan responded to Trump’s overnight attempt at damage control. On CNN’s State of the Union, Khan said that while he appreciated Trump’s acknowledgement of his late son’s heroism, Mr. Khan said he stood by his criticisms of Trump’s positions and practices.

Fill-in host Jim Acosta asked Mr. Khan to respond directly to Trump’s suggestion that Mrs. Khan remained silent onstage at the DNC out of some form of religious oppression, and Khan let Trump have it, explaining that his wife was too distraught to speak, that she risked medical consequences to stand there, and that Trump needs to learn some empathy:

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From The Intersection of Madness and Reality:

After the racially charged, circus like atmosphere that was the RNC (Republican National Convention), it would seem that the DNC (Democratic National Convention) would have its hands full. There was a lot of negative connotations that would easily make the DNC the preferred convention for media coverage. However, the sensationalism of the RNC would have to be strategically countered by honesty and focus during the DNC. In short, the Democrats would have to simply come with their “A” game focused on the issues the people care about.

Beyond all of this, the first day was dedicated to endorsement power. And with a convincing endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama came out the winner.

Then again, Michelle Obama has been winning for the past couple of weeks.

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From Green Eagle:

Three more courts have ruled strongly in favor of what we all know to be true-throwing out the Republican vote suppression bills in three more States. Let me again say what I have said before on recent occasions like this: There is not a single informed person of any political stripe that did not know that these laws were not intended to protect us from voter fraud, an essentially nonexistent phenomenon, but were intended to prevent Democrats from voting.

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From Jon Perr at Perrspectives:

If nothing else, Republicans used their convention in Cleveland to get their hate on. The delegates who cheered Chris Christie’s ersatz prosecution of Hillary Clinton had already made “lock her up” the event’s lasting sound bite. Offstage, Trump surrogates accused Clinton of “treason” and called for her execution by hanging or firing squad. The foaming at the mouth crowd raged about “radical Islam,” an all-encompassing enemy they could neither describe nor explain how to defeat. Meanwhile, the delegates approved a platform would bestow 14th Amendment protections to fetuses while denying them to actual, living LGBT Americans.

But if Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign ushered in the era of “Post-Truth Politics,” Donald Trump’s coronation marked the rise of the “No Policy Candidate.” For example, on Wednesday, advisers Stephen Moore and Lawrence Kudlow announced their proposed overhaul of Trump’s gigantic tax cut windfall for the wealthy, supposedly reducing his Treasury-draining from $10 trillion to $3 trillion over the next decade. But even more telling when it comes to Donald Trump’s disinterest in actual policy is what the 2016 Republican Platform declared about health care and retirement income for future seniors. After a year of promising Americans he would “save Social Security and Medicare without cuts,” nominee Trump looked the other way as his party’s platform endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plans to gut both.

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From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg View:

The theme of the Democratic convention was “Stronger Together,” and the final day of the convention — and Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech — proved the point.

The speech itself? Clinton remains a second-rate orator, perhaps the equal of several previous nominees such as George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, as well as Mitt Romney, Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis. Her speech, like those delivered by all those men, was good enough.

What she lacks in skills, however, and what the speech lacked at time in craft, was more than made up for by the rest of the room, the pageantry and the historic occasion.

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From Bipartisan Report:

Despite the fact that Senator Harry Reid and other high ranking intelligence officials from both sides have asked that Donald Trump not be given access to classified information just yesterday, today, Trump was given his first shot learning sensitive information this afternoon.

Trump attended an intelligence briefing this afternoon in which he was told sensitive information for his own safety and for the safety of Americans. Within hours he was neck deep into one of his classic word salads when he proved Harry Reid and other Pentagon officials right.

In what was the biggest faux pas of his entire political career, Trump accidentally revealed sensitive and classified information about the locations of secret military bases.

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