Leonard Pitts and the parents of Captain Humayun Khan
In the end, it wasn’t even close.
After a GOP gathering in Cleveland that had all the incandescent joy of a biblical plague, the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was as bracing as snow down your back on the most scalding day in August. In terms of star power (Meryl Streep versus Chachi from “Happy Days”), production values and substance, there was no contest. One was a sixth-grade talent show, the other a matinee of “Hamilton.” …
For all that, though, the emotional center of the convention might have been someone who wasn’t much of an orator at all, whose first language isn’t even English. With his wife at his side, Khizr Khan, a Pakistan-born immigrant, addressed the crowd. “Tonight,” he said, “we are honored to stand here as parents of Captain Humayun Khan and as patriotic American Muslims with undivided loyalty to our country.” …
“Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery?” demanded the grieving father. “Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing, and no one!” he cried, voice rising with barely suppressed outrage. “We cannot solve our problems by building walls, sowing division.”
In the last day, Donald Trump has responded to the Kahn family. In his statements, Trump managed to suggest that heartbroken Ghazala Khan was silent because she was suppressed by Islam, and that Trump’s sacrifices—which are apparently working hard and making a lot of money—were equal to those of the Khans. Trump again attacked the grieving family at his Saturday night rally.
I’ve said before that Donald Trump is a fascist. He is. He’s also a nationalist, a racist, a misogynist, and a bully who supports torture and lawlessness. But all those words are too weak. They’re not up to the task of defining the real problem with Donald Trump.
We’re used to dealing with politicians whose positions fall somewhere along a spectrum from left to right, and while we may often feel that they cling to these positions out of unenlightened self interest, what they are for the most part is wrong. Ronald Reagan was wrong when he pushed on America the idea of trickle-down economics. George W. Bush was wrong when he expanded the war into Iraq. They were wrong.
Donald Trump isn’t wrong. Donald Trump is evil.
It’s an old word. Old enough that it’s origins are obscure. It’s a word not much employed on the talk show circuit except when someone is trying to justify why they dropped on a bomb on some distant village. But it’s the appropriate term for Trump.
Donald Trump is evil in the most basic, most banal meaning of the term. He’s malicious. He’s selfish. He is deeply depraved.
His first instinct is to hurt. His second instinct is to hurt. His third instinct is to laugh over the pain.
Donald Trump is not the Lord of the Flies. He’s simply first among those who draw pleasure in pulling the wings off of flies; those whose greatest joy comes from making someone else feel worse. And his followers can pretend whatever they like, but they’re only there to see him kick someone who is already down, throw acid in someone’s wounds, and foul any hint of honor or dignity.
You know the saying about what it takes for evil to triumph. Don’t let that happen.
Now, let’s see what else is on the editorial pages this morning.
Did I mention you should go read the complete Leonard Pitts piece. You should.
The New York Times and the truth about immigration.
Donald Trump and his allies at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland peddled two falsehoods about America’s immigration problem. One was the vision presented by speaker after speaker of a nation overrun with foreigners crossing American borders and infiltrating communities to rob and kill. Another was the notion that most Americans are desperate for the kind of tough-guy response — including massive deportation and building a wall — that Mr. Trump offers as his solution.
A careful examination of the facts undermines both claims. It is true that this is a complex issue inspiring strong passions. But its resolution, or at least progress toward a resolution, requires clear thinking. It benefits not at all from wild and poisonous assertions. People on all sides of this issue, including Republicans of good will who might be seduced by Mr. Trump’s hyperbole, would do well to take a moment or more to reflect on a few simple truths.
Don’t expect Trump to admit this. PolitiFact scores 70% of everything Trump says as a lie. It’s a record. But then, you know. Evil.
Kathleen Parker continues her retreat from the Party of Trump
A longtime Republican friend texted just as the Democratic National Convention was burying itself in balloons: “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m a Democrat.”
Another Republican friend called after President Obama spoke Wednesday night: “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m a Democrat.”
No apologies necessary. But thanks surely go to Donald Trump and his spineless Republican enablers. The party of Lincoln, a sometimes laughable bragging point for diehards whose racial attitudes survived the Civil War intact, is long gone. Its dissolution began at least with Richard Nixon, who embraced a Southern strategy that pandered to racists and set the course for today’s GOP.
Parker seems genuinely done with them. She’s sticking to her conservative positions, but after pushing herself away from Trump the candidate during the spring, this really has become her summer of discontent.
With its acceptance of Trump, the party has implicitly embraced the most un-American of litmus tests for citizens and immigrants based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation. Republicans are becoming ideologues of exclusion and marginalization, with hints of oppression to come.
Dana Milbank isn’t feeling it
Then there was the acceptance speech, a passable but unmemorable oration that showed every sign of being written by committee. In the hall, I had the feeling that Clinton was trying to enjoy giving the speech to an audience pretending to like it. The atmosphere was far less energetic than the one in the hall a week earlier for Trump’s fear fest in Cleveland.
Which pretty much shows that Milbank wasn’t listening to the same speech, or watching the same convention, that that everyone else seemed to see.
Milbank wants Hillary to spend the next 100 days screaming about Trump, and is disappointed she didn’t spend !00% of her time on the doom that’s coming if he wins. But you know, Trump takes care of that himself.
Barton Swaim had a different take on Hillary’s acceptance speech
As I listened to Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech, though, I thought I heard attempts to use language itself to stir and provoke. Perhaps that’s because, like Bush, she isn’t a gifted orator. Her manner is wooden, her enunciation angular, and everything she says sounds (to my ear anyway) about a half-tone sharp. I wonder, then, if she has rightly concluded that she must rely on the words themselves.
I’m not going to recommend reading Swaim’s piece. Partly because—Swaim being Swaim, he hides two ads for his own work in his review of Hillary, and partly because Swaim’s analysis is not quite up to a decent sophomore English class effort. (Did you know that George W Bush left us with memorable phrases, while Barack Obama just uses ‘charisma’? Barton Swaim does!)
Ross Douthat is upset that Democrats took all the pro-America talk
The key pivot point in the Democratic convention arrived during President Obama’s speech on Wednesday, when he told the throng of Democrats that Donald Trump’s baleful convention rhetoric “wasn’t particularly Republican — and it sure wasn’t conservative.”
With that olive branch to anti-Trump Republicans, he shifted his party’s convention from the mission of its first two days (shoring up the base, mollifying Berners) to the mission of its grand finale: the appropriation of conservative tropes and themes — God and country, the flag and 9/11, the founding fathers and the Constitution — in the service of symbolic outreach to Republicans and right-leaning independents.
”Appropriation.” I find it pretty damn astounding that Douthat thinks God, the country, the flag, the founders or 9/11 belonged to Republicans. In fact, even for Douthat I find it sickeningly presumptive. What Douthat means is that Republicans should get to wield God as a weapon to assault the rights of women and gays with no possible appeal. They should get to wave the flag, as if sending young service members out to die by the thousands is the only measure of love for the nation. They should get to use selective quotes, delivered a mile from any context, to show that the founders favored whatever reduction of rights they are pressing. They should get to stand on the rubble of 9/11 and use it to elevate calls for fear, at the same time that they are denying 9/11 first responders and their families the benefits they need.
And sure enough, the bulk of Douthat’s piece is a ridiculous pretense that Democrats can’t have a slice of American pie, unless they make a leap to the right to get it. Nope. Just nope. And an indefinite time-out for Douthat.
Ramesh Ponnuru is also upset that Democrats didn’t hop right to grab #NeverTrumpers
Part of what makes Mr. Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party so impressive is that it came at the expense of several of its factions. But that also means that voters in several parts of the usual Republican coalition might be tempted to defect this year, or at least to sit this election out. …
As much as the Democrats of Philadelphia invited Republicans to join them, though, they did little to make themselves attractive to them. The Democrats insist on hurtling to the left on issue after issue.
And that’s pretty most where the rest of it goes. Just without the assumption that God is a Republican.
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have noticed a common feature of states that are doing well
How can America’s leaders foster broad prosperity? For most Republicans — including Donald J. Trump — the main answer is to “cut and extract”: Cut taxes and business regulations, including pesky restrictions on the extraction of natural resources, and the economy will boom.
Mr. Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are united by the conviction that cutting taxes — especially on corporations and the wealthy — is what drives growth.
A look at the states, however, suggests that they’re wrong. Red states dominated by Republicans embrace cut and extract. Blue states dominated by Democrats do much more to maintain their investments in education, infrastructure, urban quality of life and human services — investments typically financed through more progressive state and local taxes. And despite what you may have heard, blue states are generally doing better.
I was impressed by all the Republican governors at the RNC who were quick to throw shade on President Obama, then turn around and claim high levels of employment in their states—while never mentioning that their states were doing worse than Democratically led neighborsand often worse than the national average.
Alyssa Rosenberg knows that we’re all getting tired of the songs that got huge amounts of repeat airplay both at the convention and in the days following, but she thinks we might be missing something
… whatever our basic tendency to fist-pump to anodyne affirmations, the use or overuse of “Fight Song,” along with “Brave” and “Roar,” by the Clinton campaign has concealed something particularly interesting about the way they’ve functioned on the trail. It’s not unusual for politicians to pick music to send cultural signals. But it does feel somewhat unusual for a candidate to use song lyrics to imply the politically unsayable. …
“Brave,” “Fight Song” and “Roar” are about the same idea: overcoming fear so debilitating that it’s silenced and diminished the person who experiences it. And they’re not remotely subtle on that score.
I’m a fiend for lyrics. I wouldn’t rate any of these songs as being exceptionally complex in their word-play or their phrasing, though Rachel Platten’s ‘Fight Song’ definitely falls on the pretty clever side of the line. But if the Clinton campaign is using songs to help convey their message … that’s a good idea.
David Ignatius worries that Russia’s intervention into our election won’t stop with the DNC. Or the DCC. or the Clinton campaign.
For decades, Russian intelligence agencies have used what they call “active measures” to destabilize their rivals. Now they seem to be turning those tools on the U.S. political system, though in the process they appear to have violated Rule No. 1 of the spy business: Don’t get caught. …
The scope of possible Russian political hacking broadened Friday with reports that computer systems of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had been breached. …
What worries U.S. officials most is that given Russia’s demonstrated willingness to use covert action against its adversaries, it might secretly intervene just before the November election. That might mean releasing embarrassing Clinton emails, as GOP nominee Donald Trump has urged Moscow to do. It might mean leaking phony news stories, or finding ways to upset financial markets. The American political system is an open and vulnerable target.
They could hack into polls weeks or months before the election and make it seem like Republican candidates are doing much better than they really are! Oh, wait. Rasmussen has that covered.
Adam Smith reviews 5,000 years of wall building, and why Trump’s wall would also be a failure
Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico to block the flow of migrants has been justly criticized on moral, economic and political grounds. But while the Trump Wall (as he has called it) is the most provocative proposal of the election season, it is not particularly original. Over the past five millennia, politicians have repeatedly turned to large walls to solve problems. We should look carefully at the track record of this ancient technology before we invest what some estimates suggest could be $25 billion in construction costs for a 2,000-mile-long wall, plus millions more in annual maintenance.
Nice, if brief, look at the history of walls employed for both military and immigration purposes—and their track record of failure.
And on that theme of Donald Trump and evil, I’ll be back in an hour or so with a longer bit.
