RUTHFULLY YOURS

“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.

Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of a slain American soldier, is an attorney who has previously written in a law journal about Islamic law. He specifically wrote about the purity of the Quran and the Sunnah over all other texts and interpretations.

Khan rose to fame after speaking at the Democratic National Convention Thursday and pulling out a pocket U.S. Constitution imploring if Donald Trump had even read it.

Khan wrote “Juristic Classification Of Islamic Law” in the Houston Journal of International Law in 1983. In it he breaks down different levels of Islamic law. Khan writes that the Quran and the Sunnah which were both directly created by the Muslim prophet Muhammad were the only sources in Muhammad’s lifetime that “were recognized as binding.”

“The Shari’ah-was completed during the lifetime of Prophet Muhammed, in the Quran and Sunnah. This brings up an important fact which is generally overlooked, that the invariable and basic rules of Islamic Law are only those prescribed in the Shari’ah (Quran and Sunnah), which are few and limited,” Khan continues to write. “All other juridical works which have been written during more than thirteen centuries are very rich and indispensable, but they must always be subordinated to the Shari’ah and open to reconsideration by all Muslims.”

In the journal article, Khan goes on to explain the importance of Islamic laws and interpretations to Muslim followers. He writes that: “The present form of the Quran is one and the same in every part of the Muslim world, and it has been so all through the centuries. This, Muslims believe, is due to the fact that the compilation and arrangement of chapters was completed-under divine instructions-by the Prophet himself.”

It is due to this that Khan writes, “to Muslims, the Quran being the very word of God, it is the absolute authority from which springs the very conception of legality and every legal obligation.”

The Muslim attorney writes that, “it has to be admitted, however, that the Quran, being basically a book of religious guidance, is not an easy reference for legal studies. It is more particularly an appeal to faith and the human soul rather than a classification of legal prescriptions.” Khan added that, “the major portion of the Quran is, as with every Holy Book, a code of divine exhortation and moral principals.”

My #NeverTrump colleagues and friends make valid points about Donald Trump. I know: I made them myself during the Republican primaries.

But it is vital to understand what happens if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. This country will be so far from what the Founders wanted, so different from what the #NeverTrumpers have always fought for, that it is almost impossible to see how America would recover from her — or any Democrat’s — victory.

Thanks to the universities’ leftist indoctrination of two generations of Americans, and thanks to Bernie Sanders, the Democratic party is now in all but name a socialist party. In fact, it is actually to the left of many European socialist parties.

For example, if Clinton wins, the government will now tell companies how much they must pay employees: “If you believe that companies should share profits with their workers, not paid executive bonuses, join us,” she brazenly announced.

And if you think that this is unconstitutional, remember that it won’t matter, because she will appoint left-wing Supreme Court justices and left-wing federal judges who do not view their roles as protectors of the Constitution. They view their roles as promoting “social justice,” which has as much to do with justice as “people’s democracy” has to do with democracy.

There will still be a country called the United States, a geographic entity situated between Canada and Mexico, but it will not be the America envisioned by the Founders, or by most Americans until the middle of the 20th century.

A few days before Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he promised that if elected, “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

He has been true to his word. And Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party will continue this fundamental transformation.

I always thought that James Comey was a company man. As it happens, the company he heads is among the most influential, powerful and scary companies in the world––the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But still, a company guy. Whether working for a president on the moderate-to-conservative spectrum like G.W. Bush or for the far-left current occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Obama, makes absolutely no difference to this type of obedient––and now we know, subservient––accommodator.

The red flag of skepticism should have gone up years ago to the American public when lavish praise was heaped on Comey by people who revile each other. While the spin insists that Comey is a lot of virtuous things––“straight-shooter,” ”unbiased,” “fair-minded,” “non-partisan” “man of his word”–– don’t be fooled. That’s Orwellian newspeak for someone who will do and say anything to keep his job, including, as Comey did in the latest Clinton fiasco case, (1) create out of whole cloth an “intent” criterion in federal law to let a clearly corrupt politician off the hook, and (2) appropriate the job of the Attorney General in announcing what the outcome of the FBI’s investigation should be.

While citing Hillary’s “extreme negligence” in handling classified information, a virtual litany of illegal acts committed by the then-Secretary of State, and the fact that hostile foreign operatives may have accessed her e-mail account, Comey said he would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Hillary, he said, was “extremely careless” and “unsophisticated,” among other spitballs he hurled in her direction before completely letting her off the hook!

Comey’s friend and colleague, Andrew C. McCarthy, says that the FBI director’s decision is tantamount to sleight-of-hand trickery. “There is no way of getting around this,” McCarthy writes. “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation…in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.”

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of AmericanThinker.com, wrapped the entire debacle up neatly, saying that “the director of the FBI offered 15 of the most puzzling minutes in the history of American law enforcement. James Comey spent the first 12 minutes or so laying out a devastating case dismantling Hillary Clinton’s email defense. Then, “in a whiplash-inducing change of narrative, he announced that `no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring the case he had just outlined, an assertion that was contradicted within hours by luminaries including former U.S. attorney (and NY City mayor) Rudy Giuliani and James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office.”

Which begs the question: Why would Comey act contrary to the wisdom of virtually every legal scholar who has written or spoken about this case?

Our nation’s immigration laws are completely blind as to race, religion and ethnicity, and were enacted to protect national security and the lives and livelihoods of Americans.

My previous post for CAPS, “Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Goals Make Her Economic Promises Impossible to Achieve,” focused on how providing potentially tens of millions of illegal aliens with an equal standing in the overflowing labor pool of unemployed or underemployed American and lawful immigrant workers would exacerbate the plight of these desperate workers and their families.

Today my focus will be on how Hillary Clinton’s proposal to provide millions of illegal aliens with lawful status would do irreparable harm to national security and public safety.

Hillary has made much of having been Secretary of State. During her acceptance speech at the DNC she said, in part, “We will not build a wall,” thereby echoing the remarks of her successor at the State Department, John Kerry who, in his commencement address at Northeastern University several months ago, said, in part, that America could not remain great by hiding behind walls.

I recently wrote a commentary about Kerry’s dangerous globalist agenda that apparently is paralleled by Clinton, “John Kerry: Enthusiastic Proponent of a ‘Borderless World.’”

Metaphorically, America’s borders are her walls.

One of the critical roles of the State Department is to issue visas to aliens who seek entry into the United States. The visa process came under scrutiny by the 9/11 Commission. It identified failures in border security and failures of the visa process that enabled the 19 terrorists in the 9/11 hijackings and terrorists who preceded them. Visa fraud was a means to enter the U.S., allowing them to embed themselves in the country as they went about their deadly preparations.

Given this, any journalist who interviews Hillary Clinton should ask if she has read “The 9/11 Commission Report.”

That report should be required reading for the president of the U.S., all high-ranking members of the administration and every member of Congress.

The official government report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,”focused specifically on the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world, enter the U.S. and ultimately embed themselves here as they went about their deadly preparations to carry out an attack. The preface of this report begins with the following paragraph:

“It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.”

Donald Trump, to the degree he is coherent, wants Americans to think the following of the Obama administration, the Clinton candidacy, and the entire progressive enterprise. His three-part writ could be summed up as follows:

1) Obama has doubled the national debt in just eight years. He has abdicated U.S. leadership abroad, was taken for a patsy by duplicitous trade partners, has deliberately divided races and tribes at home for transient political advantage, has nationalized health care into a mess, has overregulated and overtaxed the economy into near-zero-growth stasis, and has whitewashed all of the above with upbeat banalities about hope and change.

2) During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the Obama administration oversaw the destruction of the modern Middle East, ignored the rise of ISIS, engineered a failed reset that empowered Putin’s Russia, let China systematize unfair and injurious trade practices that fuel an aggressive foreign policy, and alienated traditional friends while courting longstanding enemies. Clinton’s record of government service is one of decades of prevarication, malfeasance, and corruption.

3) Progressivism is a euphemism for a grievance-based agenda with mandated equality of result. An incompetent, uncaring, and always larger government is its agency — a project that demands constant tax increases and ever-greater social spending. It seeks to divide the country up by identity groups, politicize the bureaucracies, and ignore the old working classes, especially the white lower middle class.

The Democrats held a convention to prove all of Trump’s above depictions laughable by attacking Trump himself, often an easy target. Instead, they often seemed to confirm them. Consider:

A) Presidential candidates of the incumbent party usually have no choice but to promise more of the same good times. When they either will not or cannot offer rosy promises of continuity, they do not do well. Harry Truman and George H. W. Bush promised respectively more of Roosevelt and Reagan, and won; Adlai Stevenson and John McCain seemed to run away from their predecessors’ record, and lost.

Mainstream media figures from the New York Times to the Huffington Post to CNN are apoplectic Monday as their latest attack on Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has crumbled yet again under the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Specifically, the newest line of attack to fall apart is the criticism of Trump over Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father who spoke at the Democratic National Convention last week.

Over the weekend and for the past few days since Khan spoke alongside his wife Ghazala Khan about their son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004, media-wide reporters, editors, producers, and anchors have tried to lay criticism on Trump over the matter. They thought they had a good one, a specific line of attack that pitted Trump against the military—and supposedly showed him as a big meanie racist in the process.

But, as Breitbart News showed on Monday midday, that clearly was not the case. Khizr Khan has all sorts of financial, legal, and political connections to the Clintons through his old law firm, the mega-D.C. firm Hogan Lovells LLP. That firm did Hillary Clinton’s taxes for years, starting when Khan still worked there involved in, according to his own website, matters “firm wide”—back in 2004. It also has represented, for years, the government of Saudi Arabia in the United States. Saudi Arabia, of course, is a Clinton Foundation donor which—along with the mega-bundlers of thousands upon thousands in political donations to both of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2016—plays right into the “Clinton Cash” narrative.

All of this information was publicly available, and accessible to anyone—including any of these reporters, and Breitbart News—with a basic Google search. Anyone interested in doing research about the subjects they are reporting on—otherwise known as responsible journalism—would have checked into these matters. But clearly, none in the mainstream media did—probably because, as Fox News’ Chad Pergram noted, Democrats “sense blood in the water over” the whole Khan controversy.

Earlier on Monday, as CNN host Kate Bolduan stacked a panel with three anti-Trump analysts against Scottie Nell Hughes—the only Trump supporter present—Bolduan admitted she has not done basic research about Khan.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, what law firm he’s connected to,” Bolduan, a CNN anchor, plainly admitted on live television on Monday during a discussion with Hughes.

Are the Saudis trying to make sure that the candidate of their choice is elected President of the United States this November?

Khizr Khan is more than just the father of slain Muslim U.S. serviceman Humayun Khan and the mainstream media’s flavor of the moment in its ongoing efforts to demonize and destroy Donald Trump. As far as the Obama administration and Hillary campaign are concerned, he is a living validation of the success of their strategy against “extremism”: by refusing to identify the enemy as having anything to do with Islam, they draw moderate Muslims to their side and move them to fight against terrorism. By contrast, Trump, in their view, alienates these moderates and drives them into the arms of the terrorists.

That all sounds great. There’s just one catch: Khizr Khan, and the Clinton campaign, have extensive ties to the Saudis – far more extensive than any possible connection that Donald Trump’s campaign may have had to Russia’s alleged involvement in the leak of emails that revealed that the entire Democratic Party presidential nominating process was rigged from the start. Not that the mainstream media will pause from speculating about Trump and the Russians long enough to tell you any facts about Khizr Khan, Hillary and the Saudis.

Intelius records that Khizr Khan has worked at Hogan Lovells Llp. According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Hogan Lovells LLP, another U.S. firm hired by the Saudis, is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia through 2016, disclosures show. Robert Kyle, a lobbyist from the firm, has bundled $50,850 for Clinton’s campaign.”

The Free Beacon added that the Saudi government has “supplied the Clinton Foundation with millions. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has given between $10 and $25 million to the foundation while Friends of Saudi Arabia has contributed between $1 and $5 million.”

And so we were treated to the spectacle of an employee of a firm that is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia lambasting Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention, and then (lo and behold!) becoming a media darling as he excoriates Trump for his “black soul.”

Might the government of Saudi Arabia, which has spent countless bullions of dollars spreading the virulent and violent Wahhabi strain of Islam around the world, have any interest in making sure that a presidential candidate who speaks more forthrightly about the Islamic terror threat than any presidential candidate has since John Quincy Adams, and who has vowed to take concrete steps to counter that threat, is defeated? Is that why Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous indignation and misleading disinformation about the relationship of Islamic jihad terrorism to Islam, was not only featured at the Democratic National Convention but has dominated the news cycle ever since?

This has gone on long enough. The 28-page section of the 9/11 report detailing Saudi involvement in the September 11, 2001 jihad attacks were just finally released (albeit with substantial portions still redacted), after being kept classified for fifteen years by one President who held hands with the Saudi King and another who bowed to him. And for fifteen years, the U.S. has done little or nothing to free itself from dependence upon Saudi oil and develop alternative energy sources. Why not? We know the Saudis have kept the Clintons’ palms abundantly greased. Who else’s?