Both Candidates Attack Gold Star Families
One attack was dumb, the other was downright malicious.
Two presidential candidates. Two incredibly stupid things said about Gold Star military families. So let’s compare.
At the Democrat Convention, Khizr Khan, the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, gave a speech in which he directed this to Donald Trump: “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.” Khan also asserted that Trump wouldn’t have even let his son into the country. Khan is a Muslim, and his wife stood behind him wearing a head covering. That’s where Trump first focused his attention, responding, “He was very emotional and probably looked like a nice guy to me. His wife, 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.” Trump then launched into some talking points about terrorism. Challenged on the sacrifice question, Trump first asked, “Did Hillary’s scriptwriters write it?” Then he pointed to the sacrifices he’s made like … creating jobs and working for a Vietnam memorial. Ok then. In another venue, Trump insisted that Khan had “no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution.”
It’s arguable that Clinton defamed this Gold Star family by using them as political fodder in the first place.
“Here’s a handy rule of life,” says Iraq veteran David French. “Always honor Gold Star families. Always.” Indeed, if Trump wants to be the commander in chief, he’s going to have to do better than attacking Gold Star families, policy disagreements notwithstanding. Given his history of declaring that the military will obey him even on illegal orders, he has a long way to go. But that’s what you get from a man who speaks just about everything that pops into his head, with little or no filter.
That’s bad, but Hillary Clinton’s calculated lies are far worse. Pat Smith, the mother of Benghazi KIA Sean Smith, spoke at the Republican convention, and again reminded the country that Clinton lied to her face about the cause of the attack. Addressing the families in 2012, Clinton said, “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.”
Clinton lied and has been lying about her lies ever since, all while accusing Smith of lying. Over the weekend, she responded to Smith’s RNC speech, saying, “I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said.” Just because Clinton is an expert in reiterating, “I don’t recall,” doesn’t mean Pat Smith or the other family members of the slain don’t remember what Clinton told them.
Worse than the lies are the deaths — Clinton is responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. And worse still is the fact that the Obama-Clinton foreign policy team is to blame for hundreds of thousands of deaths and general chaos in the Middle East.
Trump says dumb things with regularity, while Clinton is cold, deceitful, and based on her own record is utterly disqualified from serving as commander in chief. Welcome to the 2016 election.
(Updated.)
