RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald J. Trump really knows how to stick his foot in his mouth. And then his calf. And then his thigh. If he keeps going, he will be in real trouble.

The Republican presidential nominee’s protracted fight with Ghazala and Khizr Khan has been a wholly unnecessary and incredibly unhelpful distraction from the fight he needs to wage against Hillary Clinton and her collectivist dream: to preserve Obamaism and protect the policies that have enfeebled America overseas and slowed GDP growth to a near-standstill — 1 percent, on average, for the first half of 2016.

Trump’s battle with the mother and father of the late U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan — who was killed in action in Iraq in June 2004 — is cold, foolish, and self-destructive. When the Pakistani-born parents of this American military hero condemned Trump’s proposed limits on Muslim immigration, he should have let their words roll away, like raindrops on an umbrella. Instead, Trump grabbed that umbrella and smacked the Khans with it — even as Republicans recoiled, and Democrats danced jigs of joy.

Trump should know what any candidate for fifth-grade class president already understands: Don’t attack the mother of a dead soldier. Trump must make it easier to keep the support of conservatives and Republicans who need him to demolish Crooked Hillary.

All of that said, Trump’s long-distance jousting with the Khans is nowhere as egregious as Clinton’s in-your-face lies to Patricia Smith — mother of Sean Smith, an American diplomat whom al-Qaeda-affiliated radical Islamic terrorists murdered in the September 11, 2012, Benghazi massacre.

Hillary stared right at this mourning mother as her son lay in a casket just feet away, at Andrews Air Force Base that September 14.

As Smith told the Republican National Convention, “When I saw Hillary Clinton at Sean’s coffin ceremony, just days later, she looked me squarely in the eye and told me a video was responsible.”

Hillary Clinton denies this. In fact, she questioned Smith’s mental capacity. The Democrat standard bearer told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, “I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said.”

However, strong evidence arose yesterday to corroborate Smith’s account and underscore the question with which she closed her emotional convention speech: “If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?”

Early 20th-century modernism ignored classical rules of expression. But late 20th-century postmodernism blew up those rules altogether.

Barack Obama was a modernist candidate. He turned out vast numbers of young and minority voters, mastered new social media, and in 2008 overturned the old-guard Democratic furniture such as Hillary Clinton.

In contrast, Donald Trump has simply destroyed normal politics. Unlike Obama with his record Wall Street fundraising of 2008 and 2012, Trump has raised almost no money. He ignores endorsements from political kingpins. Trump has organized no serious voter registration drives. His convention was bizarre, showcasing his kids instead of party bosses and special-interest groups.

How about internal polling? Trump seems to have none.

Sophisticated opposition research? Zilch.

Standard talking points? Not so much.

Teleprompted speeches? Trump prefers ad hoc stream of consciousness.

Candidates are supposed to avoid the pitfalls of press conferences as much as possible — and prep for days when they are obligated to give them. Not Trump. He thrives on unscripted rants to the press without much worry about what he says.

Candidates dislike and fear reporters, and so seek to flatter them. Trump openly insults them and occasionally kicks them out of his press conferences.

Modern politicians generally avoid getting pulled into nasty, lose-lose fights. Trump welcomes brawls against all comers.

Hillary Clinton has taken huge quid pro quo contributions from rich people as she damns the influence of big money in politics. Trump cannot seem to find any big donors. He trashes crony capitalist insiders on the grounds that he used to be one himself.

Traditional politicians such as Mitt Romney were perfectly groomed and rarely appeared without tailored suits. Modernist politicians such as Obama like to be photographed on the golf links appearing young, hip, and cool, wearing shades and polo shirts.

But Trump defies both traditional and nontraditional tastes by wearing loud, long ties, combing his dyed-yellow hair over a bald spot, and tanning his skin a strange orange hue.

Politicians attack each other while faking politeness. The coolest do it with nuance. Not Trump. He uses taboo words like “liar” and “crooked.”

Modernist candidates voice platitudes about border enforcement. But only a postmodern one would demand that Mexico pay for a wall.

He was presented to the nation as a Constitution-loving (he carries a pocket copy, dontcha know!) immigrant who just happens to be from Pakistan, but it turns out that Khizr Khan is a recognized scholar on sharia law. And in his published writings, he seems to approve of subordinating the Constitution to Allah’s own sharia. Paul Sperry reports at Breitbart:

Khizr M. Khan has published papers supporting the supremacy of Islamic law over “man-made” Western law — including the very Constitution he championed in his Democratic National Convention speech attacking GOP presidential nod Donald Trump.

In 1983, for example, Khan wrote a glowing review of a book compiled from a seminar held in Kuwait called “Human Rights In Islam” in which he singles out for praise the keynote address of fellow Pakistani Allah K. Brohi, a pro-jihad Islamic jurist who was one of the closest advisers to late Pakistani dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq, the father of the Taliban movement.

Khan speaks admiringly of Brohi’s interpretation of human rights, even though it included the right to kill and mutilate those who violate Islamic laws and even the right of men to “beat” wives who act “unseemly.”

Brohi has quite a few “accomplishments” for Khan to admire:

[Brohi] restored Sharia punishments, such as amputations for theft and demands that rape victims produce four male witnesses or face adultery charges. He also made insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad a crime punishable by death. To speed the Islamization of Pakistan, he and Zia issued a law that required judges to consult mullahs on every judicial decision for Sharia compliance.

And as for Khan’s wife, the silent Gold Star Mother:

Brohi goes on to argue that human rights bestowed by Islam include the right of men to “beat” their wives.

“The best statement of the human rights is also to be found in the address delivered by the prophet [Muhammad] so often described as his last address,” Brohi said, quoting: “ ‘You have rights over your wives and they have rights over you. You have the right that they should not defile your bed and that they should not behave with open unseemliness. If they do, God allows you to put them in separate rooms and to beat them but not with severity.’”

Khan touted the supremacy of sharia:

Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father that Democrats and their allies media wide have been using to hammer GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, has deleted his law firm’s website from the Internet.

This development is significant, as his website proved—as Breitbart News and others have reported—that he financially benefits from unfettered pay-to-play Muslim migration into America.

A snapshot of his now deleted website, as captured by the Wayback Machine which takes snapshots archiving various websites on the Internet, shows that as a lawyer he engages in procurement of EB5 immigration visas and other “Related Immigration Services.”

The website is completely removed from the Internet, and instead directs visitors to the URL at which it once was to a page parking the URL run by GoDaddy.

The EB5 program, which helps wealthy foreigners usually from the Middle East essentially buy their way into America, is fraught with corruption. U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has detailed such corruption over the past several months, and in February issued a blistering statement about it.

“Maybe it is only here on Capitol Hill—on this island surrounded by reality—that we can choose to plug our ears and refuse to listen to commonly accepted facts,” Grassley said in a statement earlier this year. “The Government Accountability Office, the media, industry experts, members of congress, and federal agency officials, have concurred that the program is a serious problem with serious vulnerabilities. Allow me to mention a few of the flaws.”

Grassley’s statement even noted that the program Khan celebrated on his website has posed national security risks.

“There are also classified reports that detail the national security, fraud and abuse. Our committee has received numerous briefings and classified documents to show this side of the story,” Grassley said in the early February 2016 statement. “The enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security wrote an internal memo that raises significant concerns about the program. One section of the memo outlines concerns that it could be used by Iranian operatives to infiltrate the United States. The memo identifies seven main areas of program vulnerability, including the export of sensitive technology, economic espionage, use by foreign government agents and terrorists, investment fraud, illicit finance and money laundering.”

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both on the campaign trail hawking the wonders of still more “stimulus” spending via public works projects. The American economy be damned.

Their shared fundamental belief that politicians can solve all manner of problems through wise public spending — or at least that the key to winning elections is convincing voters that they are the politicians who can do it — calls to mind President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, the fictional president in the great political satire and social commentary of our time, “Idiocracy.”

Of the fictional secretary of the Interior, incorrectly named “Not Sure,” Camacho exclaims:While the President Camacho school of government may appear attractive to some on its surface, Clinton, Trump, and others who advocate central planning in general — and public works projects in particular — ignore its economic illiteracy.

One of the central problems with politics is that often the very policies that win votes are also the ones that are the most economically harmful.

Redistributing wealth to constituents, whether through “jobs” or direct handouts, is among the most common and pernicious of such policies. The system that the Founders bequeathed us would have limited such programs, but the legislative and judicial branches long ago neglected their fidelity to the Constitution and have created a vote-buying free-for-all not only accepted, but also openly celebrated by large swathes of the American people.

Front and center in the annals of economic boondoggles that make for good politics are the public works projects Clinton and Trump are currently pushing.

At the Democrat National Convention, we saw plenty of liberal figures trotted out to scare America out of voting for Republican nominee Donald Trump. In spite of calling Trump’s remarks the previous week “dark,” fear was the principal product being sold by the left in Philly.

It didn’t end there, either. This weekend, retired Gen. John Allen told ABC News‘ George Stephanopoulos that electing Trump could cause a “civil military crisis, the like of which we’ve not seen in this country.”

“When we swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, which is a document and a set of principles and it supports the rule of law, one of those is to ensure that we do not obey illegal orders,” Gen. Allen said in the interview, which was aired Sunday.

Allen apparently wasn’t just referring to Trump’s statement that he would reintroduce waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, but that he would bomb the Islamic State group. Apparently, that’s an illegal order now, too.

“He’s talked about needing to torture. He’s talked about needing to murder the families of alleged terrorists,” Allen said. “He’s talked about carpet-bombing ISIL. Who do you think is going to be carpet-bombed when all that occurs? It’s going to be innocent families.”

“What we need to do is ensure that we don’t create an environment that puts us on a track conceivably where the United States military finds itself in a civil military crisis with a commander in chief who would have us do illegal things.”

That’s a pretty damning statement. Unfortunately, it’s even more damning — for the left — when you consider who Gen. Allen is.

As Erik Prince at Breitbart pointed out, Gen. Allen is far from a dispassionate retired general, merely weighing in on an unspeakable crisis (one might even call it a coup) that might foment itself in the military should Trump be elected.

“Khan’s speech not only successfully baited Trump into playing the fool; it gave Nevertrumps an opportunity to feel good about themselves. We noticed this Sunday tweet from Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations: “Either you stand with Khizr & Ghazala Khan or Donald Trump. No middle ground. Choose your side. I’m with #KhizrKhan.” But neither Khan is running for president. The actual choice is between Mrs. Clinton and Trump, but by equivocating in this way, Boot transfers his support for Mrs. Clinton to a sympathetic figure.

As for “no middle ground,” that isn’t even true in the election, as one does have the option of abstaining or voting third-party. It certainly isn’t true of the Trump-Khan dustup. We think Trump has handled it appallingly, but we also find plenty of fault with the Democrat-media narrative that has arisen around it.

Take Khan’s j’accuse, “You have sacrificed nothing,” and Stephanopoulos’s question, “What sacrifice have you made for your country?” Do these not apply equally well to Mrs. Clinton? She didn’t serve in the military, nor did her husband (a fact Republicans hoped vainly would work against him in 1992), and their daughter has lived quite a pampered life. As David French—an Army Reserve major, Iraq veteran and Nevertrump stalwart—observes:

Hillary Clinton hasn’t sacrificed—she’s lived the progressive dream. And she’s certainly not a “public servant”—she’s a cynical, grasping, and ambitious politician. Her accomplishments are meager, and her one guiding star is her own self-advancement.

A Daily Beast column Saturday carried the headline “Chicken Hawk Trump Mocks Captain Khan’s Mother.” We’ve heard that epithet before, but isn’t hawkishness a necessary element? Trump is running as the less hawkish candidate, faulting Mrs. Clinton for voting in favor of the Iraq war and pushing for the 2011 Libya intervention.

During his DNC speech, Khan cited Trump’s proposal for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration (on which he seems to have equivocated of late, as in the Pence statement above) and answered as follows:

Let me ask you: have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words “liberty” and “equal protection of law.”

But as the Washington Examiner’s Byron York and National Review’s Andy McCarthy point out—and as we explained back in December, when Trump first put the idea forward—the Constitution places almost no limit on Congress’s power to regulate immigration, and none at all on its power to control entry of unadmitted nonresident aliens. The legal term of art is the plenary power doctrine.

As NR’s Jim Geraghty points out, the media are highly selective in their treatment of grieving parents:

Hey, remember when the first night of the Republican convention featured Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, one of the Americans slain in Benghazi? Remember how her speech was called a “cynical exploitation of grief”? Or the “unabashed exploitation of private people’s grief” or “the weaponization of grief”? Remember how she “ruined the evening”? How it was, “a spectacle so offensive, it was hard to even comprehend”? How some liberal commentators said, “Mrs. Smith was really most interested in drinking blood rather than healing”? How her speech represented an “early dip into the gutter”? Remember how a GQ writer publicly expressed a desire to beat her to death?

As is often the case, Trump’s outrageous behavior finds a precedent in his critics’ behavior—in this case, their behavior just the week before.

To be sure, the critics Geraghty cites are all journalists; none of them are seeking to become president. But do you remember John Kerry?

He launched his public career in 1971 by testifying to a series of outrageous slanders against American servicemen. Subsequently he was elected lieutenant governor of, and U.S. senator from, Massachusetts. He was the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, when he presented himself as a war hero.

Kerry has never apologized for his calumnies against his fellow Vietnam veterans, which the liberal media played down as he was pursuing the Democratic nomination. When a group of vets eventually called him out on it, Democrats and journalists smeared them.

In 2013 Kerry left the Senate after the president nominated him as secretary of state. If by Obama’s standards Trump is unfit to serve because of his obnoxious comments, how is Kerry fit?”

Army Capt. Humayun Khan, was killed in action during an extended tour in Iraq. Deployed at Baquabah, Khan served in a force protection role, and oversaw a unit securing and maintaining his base. June 8, 2004, Khan died after ordering his soldiers to stay back, and “hit the dirt,” when he approached a suspicious taxi. While Khan was moving towards the vehicle, and motioning for it to stop, two men in the taxi detonated their explosives, killing themselves, Khan, and two Iraqi soldiers. Because of his heroic sacrifice, none of Khan’s soldiers were killed in the blast. When Khan was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, he received full military honors at the burial, and his commanding officer observed in a letter,

He died selflessly and courageously, tackling the enemy head on. We will not forget him and the noble ideas he stood for.

Simply put, Humayun Khan died defending the uniquely Western conceptions of freedom articulated in the US Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

All Americans must acknowledge and honor the Khan family’s grief as parents of a heroic soldier killed in action. Their anguished perspective requires especial deference. But we should also take seriously the assertions made by Khizr Khan, Humayun’s father, and a lawyer, about the Constitution, at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) convention, which are contradicted by Khizr Khan’s earlier published opinions. Many Americans have their own copies of the Constitution (readers can get your own pocket Constitution here, for free, via Hillsdale College), and they know that Khizr Khan, perhaps in his lingering sorrow, egregiously misrepresented what our founding document states regarding immigration in the 14th amendment, as discussed recently by Byron York.

It was no doubt unintentional on Khizr Khan’s part that he appeared to attack the large majority of ordinary Americans who are concerned about the DNC’s support for admitting immigrants into the US without background checks (adequate databases for vetting Syrian Muslim refugees, as a prime example, don’t exist), even from countries with known risks for harboring jihad terrorists (i.e., like Syria). Americans want to disagree without being disagreeable, and being hectored that we have “black souls,” or lack compassion. We can have genuine, deep sympathy for the Khan family’s loss, and still disagree with Khizr Khan’s misrepresentation of the Constitution. With all due respect for his deprivation, we must review, gimlet-eyed, Mr. Khan’s published articles asserting the supremacy of Sharia over other politico-legal systems—opinions that are antithetical to the principles in the Constitution that he waved at Americans during his DNC convention address—and his own son died fighting to preserve.