A Convention of the Absurd The Democratic Convention was an exercise in absurdist theater. By Victor Davis Hanson

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.

MY SAY: THE DEMOCRAT’S KHAN JOB

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.

Pope Francis: A Fool or Liar for Islam? The pontiff’s shocking statements on “Christians” who kill. August 2, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim

At a time when Muslims all around the world are terrorizing and slaughtering non-Muslims in the name of Islam, Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, continues trying to distance Islam from violence.

Last Sunday a journalist asked him about the recent and “barbarous assassination of Fr. Jacques Hamel” in France, and how the priest was clearly “killed in the name of Islam.” To this Francis

replied that he doesn’t like speaking about Islamic violence because there is plenty of Christian violence as well… [He] said that every day when he browses the newspapers, he sees violence in Italy perpetrated by Christians: “this one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law… and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics! If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence. And no, not all Muslims are violent, not all Catholics are violent. It is like a fruit salad; there’s everything.”

Is the Pope really that dense? Is he incapable of distinguishing between violence committed in the name of a religion, and violence committed in contradiction of a religion?

Yes, Catholics—and people of all religions, sects, creeds—commit violence. That is because humans are prone to violence (or, to use Christian language that some—maybe not Francis—might understand, humans are fallen creatures). And yes, the Catholics that Francis’ cites do not commit crimes—murdering girlfriends and mother-in-law—because of any teaching contained in Christianity or Catholicism; on the contrary, Christian teachings of mercy and forgiveness are meant to counter such impulses.

On the other hand, the violence that Muslims are committing around the world—the beheadings, the sex slavery, the church burnings—are indeed contained in and a product of Islam, and they have been from day one.

Francis continued offering half-truths in the interview. After he acknowledged that there are “violent persons of this religion [Islam],” he immediately added that “in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists. Fundamentalists. We have them.”

This is another sloppy generalization. Sure, “in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists,” but that which is “fundamental” to them widely differs. One may say that Muslim and Christian fundamentalists adhere to a literalist/strict reading of their scriptures. While that statement may be true, left unsaid by those who think the issue is settled right there is: what do the Bible and Koran actually teach?

Khizr Khan’s Saudi Ties Is Saudi Arabia trying to manipulate the U.S. presidential election? Robert Spencer

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?

Hillary: ‘Director Comey Said My Answers Were Truthful’ By Debra Heine (Huh????!!!!)

Hillary Clinton has spent a lifetime in politics lying about matters both big and small. This is not exactly a revelation. Over twenty years ago, longtime New York Times political columnist William Safire wrote about his painful realization that then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was a “congenital liar” in his famous essay “Blizzard of Lies.” While most of time her tendency toward dishonesty manifests itself to cover up her own corruption and malfeasance, sometimes her fibs are intended to evoke sympathy. Other times — one suspects — she lies just for the fun of it.

It should be well established at this point that Clinton is not one to shy away from telling whoppers when the situation requires it. Her modus operandi these days in fact seems to be “lie big or go home.”

Which is exactly what she did on Fox News this weekend, earning herself four Pinocchios from the Washington Post.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace played a video of Clinton saying: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials. I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time. I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified.” Following the clip, Wallace said, “After a long investigation, FBI Director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.”

Clinton said in reply: “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.”

Unfortunately for Hillary, that wasn’t the end of it. Wallace then played a video of the exchange between Comey and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails either sent or received. Was that true?

COMEY: That’s not true.

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Was that true?

COMEY: There was classified material emailed.

Clinton stumbled a bit after that.

Pope Francis: ‘It’s Not Fair to Identify Islam With Violence and Terrorism’ By Debra Heine

Pope Francis spoke to reporters on board the papal plane again — and that never leads to anything good. His latest comments about Islamic terrorism were doubleplusungood.

Via NBC News:

Pope Francis said he doesn’t like singling out violence carried out by Muslims because people of all religions are guilty of deadly crimes.

He told reporters the situation was like “a mixed fruit salad” and that there were “violent people in all religions.”

“I do not like to talk about Islamic violence because every day when I skim the papers … I read about violence in Italy: this one who killed the girlfriend, another killed the mother-in-law … and they are all baptized Catholics,” he said aboard a Rome-bound flight from Poland on Sunday.

“If I talk about Islamic violence, then I also have to talk of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent, just like not all Catholics are violent,” the pontiff added. “It’s like a mixed fruit salad. There is a bit of everything. There are violent people in all religions.”

Yes, the pope just compared domestic violence to Islamic terror — as if a Catholic dirtbag murdering his girlfriend is the same thing as an Islamic jihadist in a truck mowing down a hundred people watching fireworks in Nice. Or Islamic State jihadists beheading 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya. Or Kenyan jihadists killing 68 people at a shopping mall. Or an Islamic terrorist gunning down dozens of people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino or a gay nightclub in Orlando. I can go on and on, obviously, because Islamic terror attacks around the world happen on a daily basis. But you get the idea — murderous Catholic boyfriends may be bad, but the damage they do is limited to one or two people and their impact on society as a whole is minimal. Islamic jihad is a threat to us all.

But stop the presses — Pope Francis had another pearl of papal wisdom for us with the stunning revelation that there are violent people in all religions. Has anyone ever suggested otherwise? The problem is there is currently only one religion where a significant number of the faithful are finding justification for murder and mayhem against unbelievers in their sacred texts. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi understands this and has called for a religious reformation of the Muslim faith. “We need to revolutionize our religion,” he proclaimed on News Year’s Day of 2015 to an audience of Muslim clerics and scholars.

We shouldn’t be surprised when an intractable ideologue like Barack Obama — the worst president in American history — ignores much-needed calls for the reform of Islam. And we’ve come to expect him to make morally and intellectually vacuous comparisons. But it is beyond disturbing to hear it coming from a pope.

Obama Admin ALREADY Discriminates Against Syrians — if They’re Christians By Patrick Poole

Non-Muslim Syrian refugees have been virtually locked out by the Obama administration, according to current data from the State Department.

According to the Refugee Processing Center, of the 6,877 Syrian refugees that have arrived in 2016 through July 31st, 6,834 of those are identified as Sunni, Shia, or generic Muslim. Only 43 (0.7 percent of total) refugees admitted have been non-Muslim.

That 0.7 percent of refugees arriving this year represents a statistically insignificant fraction of the more than 2.6 million Catholic, Syriac, Assyrian, and Greek Orthodox Christians, as well as Yazidis, other religions, and atheists living in Syria.

Yet all of these groups are being targeted by Islamic extremists — indeed, Secretary of State John Kerry himself has claimed these groups are facing a genocide.

Just yesterday, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he is opposed to any religious test for entering the United States:

Despite Ryan’s rejection, the State Department’s own numbers reveal active discrimination targeting non-Muslim Syrian refugees.

According to The Gulf/2000 Project at Columbia University, the religious breakdown of the Syrian population 2008-2009 shows that 15.98 million are Sunnis (73 percent of the population) while 3.29 million are Shiites (14.7 percent of the population). Christians account for 2.04 million people, or 9.3 percent of the population, while other religions account for 590,000 people, or 2.7 percent of the population.

This past March, Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged at a State Department press conference that minority religious communities in Syria were being targeted for genocide:

My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians, and Shiite Muslims.

So why haven’t we heard Speaker Ryan’s outrage over active religious discrimination against non-Muslim minority Syrian refugees?

And why is Kerry overseeing the systematic religious discrimination of Syrian refugees in his own State Department?

I’ve witnessed this discrimination by the State Department against Mideast Christians first-hand. Two years ago, I was introduced to an Egyptian Coptic Christian man who had fled Egypt and made it to the U.S. after he was threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood following the July 2013 ouster of Mohamed Morsi. The introduction was made by my friend, Father Anthony Hanna of the St. Mary and St. Mina Coptic Church in Concord, California. In August 2013, he escorted me into Upper Egypt to survey the destruction of Egypt’s churches and monasteries carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood.

This man’s wife and children had been attacked in their village near Minya, where attacks against Christians continue to this day. They were in hiding with family members elsewhere in Egypt, and had hoped to visit their husband and father in the United States.

With the assistance of several members of Congress who had given the family members letters of support, the family applied to visas with the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

And yet, the State Department denied their visa requests. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Left’s Anti-Trump Political Media Show By Jim Waurishuk

During last week’s Democrat National Convention there was one speaking engagement that was the epitome of mockery and hypocrisy. As a retired military officer I was appalled at this charade. That was the appearance by a gentleman Mr. Khizr Muazzam Khan and his wife, who lost a son in Iraq. I will say this once. I am extremely saddened for any family who loses a loved one in conflict fighting for this country.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media never gave a damn about Gold Star American mothers and their families over the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Global War on Terror and their suffering. Now, in just a single case, the case of immigrant Muslim parents who lost their son, there suddenly is extreme and massive interest…albeit, just for these parents.

What is more obvious and apparent, is the degree to which the Democrats and the Clinton campaign demonstrated and showed their hypocrisy by seeking to politicize their story totally for political purposes, to use this stunt to go after Donald Trump. Worst, it is abundantly clear, the parents without any reservation agreed to use their story, themselves, and the unfortunately loss of their son as political props in a made for TV political exhibition.

Again, it is time to speak out on the Anti-Trump Political Media show. What went on last weekend mainly on CNN and Sunday News/Talk shows is an outrage. The liberal media is in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and they know it. First of all the Khans stood on the stage of the DNC Convention and not only told their story, but savagely attacked Mr. Trump. They said two things that were way out of bounds; The First, that Mr. Trump has made no sacrifice, and the Second, that Mr. Trump never read the Constitution.

Mr. Khan’s first attack, presumes that a person needs to lose a child in war as a pre-condition to have an opinion on things. I served nearly 30-years in the U.S. military, through many wars, and have seen death, destruction, and I know many who have lost loved ones; son, daughters, husbands, and wives. In America, there is no pre-condition for opinion. In America there is one condition — it’s called the First Amendment.

Mr. Khan’s second attack on Mr. Trump has nothing to do with whether Mr. Trump has ever read, or did not read the Constitution. That was a clearly Democratic Party scripted stunt for this convention. His comment does however, have everything to do with Mr. Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims, from Muslim countries involved with, and or supporting terrorists and radical-Islamic terrorism.

Is there a backstory about Khizr Khan and Donald Trump? By Eileen F. Toplansky

What is one to make of the Democratic Convention speech of Khizr Khan, a Pakistani-born Virginia lawyer whose son Humayun was killed in action in Iraq in 2004?

According to Byron York:

Khan’s brief speech wasn’t a finely-detailed case. But he suggested that Trump’s Muslim ban and Mexican border wall proposals are unconstitutional. Specifically, Khan cited the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of the law’ in suggesting that Trump’s policies violate the Constitution.

But, in fact, “there’s simply no sense in which a border wall violates the Constitution.” There is also “nothing unconstitutional about deporting people who are in the United States illegally.”

York emphasizes that “[a]s far as a Muslim ban is concerned, Trump … amended his proposal to focus on immigration from countries ‘compromised by terrorism.’ But assume that Khan was addressing Trump’s original, more extensive, proposal: a temporary ban on foreign Muslims from entering the United States.”

In fact, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution applies to “all persons born or naturalized” in the United States. It does not refer to foreign persons in foreign countries. Trump made it clear that this ban “would not apply to U.S. citizens, members of the U.S. military and others with a legal right to be in the United States.” Whether one approves or disapproves of Trump’s building a wall, deporting illegal immigrants, and temporarily banning the entry of foreign Muslims, the fact is that Trump’s proposals are not unconstitutional.

In an effort toward clarification, Donald Trump released a statement:

Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe. The real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him, and the efforts of these radicals to enter our country to do us further harm. Given the state of the world today, we have to know everything about those looking to enter our country, and given the state of chaos in some of these countries, that is impossible.

Moreover, Trump reiterated that “Captain Khan, killed 12 years ago, was a hero, but this is about RADICAL ISLAMIC TERROR and the weakness of our ‘leaders’ to eradicate it!”

A Free People Erasing Their Own Freedoms By Matt Patterson and Lindsey DePasse

The erosion of loyalty to the Constitution by large sectors of the populace and those charged with protecting and preserving it.
The Greek city-state of Athens had no constitutional protections for people who advocated notions radically at odds with prevailing wisdom.

The result: Socrates was put to death for “corrupting” the youth.

Four hundred years later, the Roman province of Judea contained no constitutional protections for wild-eyed preachers who advocated radical alternatives to established political and religious orthodoxies.

The result: Jesus was crucified for claiming to be “King of the Jews.”

Sixteen hundred years later in Italy, there were no constitutional protections for thinkers who discerned profound restructuring of metaphysical realities.

The result: Galileo Galilei was tried and sentenced to house arrest by the Catholic Inquisition for advocating views contrary to Church doctrine.

Four hundred years later, the United States of America did provide constitutional protections of speech and assembly, allowing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead a movement that changed laws and expanded liberty for millions.

Socrates, Jesus and Galileo lacked governmental protection to say crazy things. As a result, they were put to death or imprisoned by the government for saying crazy things.

True, Dr. King also met with an untimely end, slain by a fellow citizen who denied him his constitutionally protected freedoms. But the others were killed or imprisoned by the government because they had no constitutionally protected freedoms.

That is all the difference in the world. And it is a difference that Dr. King died for.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution allowed Dr. King to spread his liberating and glorious message. But let us not forget that for many in the 1960’s South, Dr. King’s message was considered offensive “hate speech.” And so it was — hatred for the established order that kept millions of Americans locked in a horrible caste system. Hatred for an oligarchy that denied them essential freedoms.