Khizr Khan, Father of a 27-year-old Muslim Army captain who died in the US invasion of Iraq, delivered a speech at the Democratic national convention that sparked a controversial exchange between him and Republican nominee Donald Trump. It was a bizarre argument. Democrats complained that such brave young men could never make it into the United States under terms proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the US. This is true. But if that’s a policy had been placed, he wouldn’t be dead. Nor would be the Iraqis that he killed.
Hillary Clinton’s Bizarro Pro-Islamism
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
24 Comments. Leave new
While Trump has difficulty seeing that which is in front of his nose, he does have 20/20 hindsight. Come to think of it, that does make him more qualified than most of the GOP…
Makes him more qualified than the democratic front runner. It used to be that some dems had an accurate rear view mirror understanding of Vietnam, Iraq, etc. Now they’ve all become more stupid and violent. None more so than their leader, The Queen Of Chaos. Call her that while it’s still legal to do so.
Hi, Jack – then again, it may become law that we address her as “Your Highness”
(There’s a great line from J Men Forever “Yes, your Ass Holiness”)
Obama, the Chief Executor, operates on the premise that the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.
As in the Vietnam War, when counting among the dead, one would ask How do we know that the dead were Viet Cong?
The answer was and is always easy: If they are dead they are the enemy, be they Indians, Viet Cong, Muslims, or as has become apparent with the ubiquity of digital cameras, Black men and women.
As several commentators wrote on gocomics, Trump was strongly for the war. Checking,
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/02/donald-trump-and-the-iraq-war/
Sept. 11, 2002: Howard Stern asks Trump if he supports invading Iraq. Trump answers hesitantly. “Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish it was, I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
If that isn’t the strongest possible support I don’t know what is, and then he claims he was against the war.
(Actually, he was against the war by 2003.)
But the National Review does even better:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431746/donald-trump-iraq
They point out that Bill bombed Iraq in ’98 (and for good reason, since the House was voting on impeachment, and he had absolutely no choice) and Bill kept saying Saddam had to go, and got a bill passed authorising military action to remove Saddam. So (concludes the National Review), don’t blame Bush, jr. at all.
***
Trump will be an unmitigated disaster on domestic policy. President Clinton will be a continuation of Obama and Bill, and, with a Democratic Senate in ’17 and ’18, she’ll get to name at least one Supreme Court justice.
But there is also foreign policy.
Secretary Clinton has already given many interviews that, as soon as she takes office, she’ll rid the world of the evil Syrian regime, a regime Putin says Russia will fight to protect.
Someone pointed that the Crimea means more to Putin than Syria, but Putin can see the same row of dominoes Johnson et al saw (from the other side, of course), and he says when President Clinton attacks the legitimate government of Syria, it WILL mean war.
And Secretary Clinton says nothing will stop her.
So I guess she’s growing a Red Beard? And all the New York Times/Washington Post/Guardian/etc.,etc. columnists say Obama should have removed the evil Syrian dictator, and President Clinton must not delay in doing the needful. So they all agree the US desperately needs a Redbeard for president.
What a choice this election.
And what a MSM the US/UK/EU have.
As Ms Clinton has noted, When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit ! Anyone, irrespective of gender or ethnic origin, etc, etc, will be permitted to join the select gang delegated to murder people in countries Ms Clinton dislikes, otherwise known as «the continuing threat posed by [name of l’ennemie du jour]», after she has been duly «authorised» «to use the Armed Forces of the United States as [s]he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to–
(1) defend the national security of the United States»….
Killing, shaking off the last coils of racist, patriarchal society, will at last have become an equal-opportunity business, open to all….
Henri
Notice the strictures.
The father talks of his son’s sacrifice. However, only that sacrifice allowed the father to have a platform to say anything. If this was the father of some child blown to pieces by a U.S. drone, security would have kept him out of the convention, out of Philadelphia and possibly, as does exist in our country, “preventively” detained.
And what does the father say? He most certainly doesn’t criticize American foreign policy. He is being permitted to have his say because — and only because — his say is in accord with the patriotic [sic] message that the Democratic leadership wants propagated. And he’s even sent out with a prop: a copy of the Constitution to offer to Trump.
I know when I’m being manipulated.
«I know when I’m being manipulated.» Indeed – manipulated to support the next war that Ms Clinton intends to initiate. Wilfred Edward Salter Owen put it best :
«…
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.»
Henri
It is so very sad that these “heroes” are honored for sacrifices they made; when in reality they have been sacrificed by the war parties for the profits of imperialism. Martin Luther King Jr. made this point very clearly a year before his assassination.
Patriotism is like a cuckoo’s egg. The parent cares for the cuckoo’s egg and then the newly hatched cuckoo pushes the parent’s own offspring out of the nest and to their death.
Beware the ideologies planted in the minds of the young.
But Glenn,
This is a false patriotism. A true patriot does not simply get caught up in the pomp and festivities, doing whatever the elites command. He does what he believes is in the best interest of his nation and people, and, it seems these days all the more the case, he must endeavor to discover what that is.
There are many on both sides of the aisle who can see that at least the last Iraq invasion was not in the best interest of America because at this point its just obvious. A patriot does not want his countrymen’s lives and money spent on creating chaos and blowback, furthering the goals of other nations, or profiting a global moneyed elite…
The relevant point to a grieving parent would be, I think, the careless lack of concern for going into an illegal war that caused the son’s death, more so than some objection voiced in response to a biased overtly political statement.
Cognitive dissonance, Glenn. It is more comforting for a parent to believe that they lost a son in an heroic war to protect the country, than to accept that he died in a meaningless and illegal aggressive military adventure in a foreign land. Note that Quintus Horatius Flaccus, whose famous lines of utter bullshit – Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – Wilfred Edward Salter Owen so beautifully deconstructs in his poem from which I cite above, never participated in battle (something which Bertolt Brecht pointed out in a school essay in 1915 which nearly got him sent down)….
The most enthusiastic militarists – like Ms Clinton, Mr Cruz, and their ilk, are almost always chicken hawks to a man (and woman)….
Henri
I’ve seen that one a lot – insisting their child died protecting our freedoms. They then claim that we need to send more children off to die because otherwise their child would have died in vein.
I don’t think it works that way.
« They then claim that we need to send more children off to die because otherwise their child would have died in v[a]in.
I don’t think it works that way.»
It doesn’t, of course, At the same time, one cannot but have sympathy for the grieving parents ; those for whom I have no sympathy at all are those who put the children of others in harm’s way – both the harm of being killed and the harm of killing others – for entirely bogus reasons….
Ms Clinton, who, based on her record, would certainly put a great many people in harm’s way, both frightens and disgusts me….
Henri
Hey – he could have been shot in the vein and bled to death. 😛
Yesterday, I posted a comment about the comments on gocomics that said Trump was strongly for the war until recently, with links. The comment was blocked. Sometimes links are permitted here, sometimes not.
Trump was asked in ’02 if he was for the war, and he said, ‘Sort of,’ a complete concurrence that the US desperately needed to send troops to protect the US from the violent Iraqi jihadists that perpetrated 9/11 and had a vast nuclear arsenal aimed at the US of A. Then, in 2003, Trump was against the war, making him a vile traitor, which he remains to this day. It is the solemn duty of the US to stop both the Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, and the Russian Islamic terrorists led by the vile dictator Putin as well.
Today, Trump is rightly condemned for suggesting that the US ally with Syria and Russia against the Daesh, when the entire MSM of the US/UK/EU all confirm that it is Syria and Russia who created the Daesh by releasing prisoners from Syrian prisons and sending jihadists from Russia. The same press also reported that the prison from which the jihadists were sent was Camp Bucca, which must be Arabic for ‘Syrian Government Prison,’ and also must be Russian for ‘Russian jihadist brigade’ since I know the US media, being a free press, never regurgitates government propaganda like other nations’ presses, but always tells the Truth! Camp Bucca was located in Basra. I’m not very good at geography, but from what the MSM says, I am sure that Basra must be located somewhere on the long Syrian-Soviet border.
In any case, once President Red Beard replaces the evil governments of Syria and Russia and makes Syria and Russia peaceful and prosperous and democratic, I know, since the MSM tells me so, that this will completely eradicate all Islamic terrorism.
So I am anxiously awaiting January ’17, when President Red Beard will take office and make the world very, very peaceful.
Is this intended to be some kind of parody? Is it humanly possible to get so many fundamental facts so absolutely wrong unless you are doing it on purpose? Cranks like you make Trump look good, they could use your comment to drive voters out of Lady Macbeth’s camp, and into Trump’s, watch yourself.
Poe’s Law.
You must be new. Michael does a version of this parody on nearly every thread–not that I mind.
Michael for Sec State !…
Henri
I second the nomination.
«I second the nomination.» We shall have to see, Glenn, how the US Senate deals with that «Advice and Consent» business…. 😉
Henri
If Trump can claim to have been against the war in Iraq without any evidence of taking that stand when it mattered, then Hillary can too (“I voted to give Bush the power to invade, but I didn’t think he’d USE it.”)
Clinton has blood on her hands for Iraq. But not even as much as, say, Ralph Nader. Without Clinton’s vote, the war could still have gone forward; without Nader in Florida, Bush would never have won. (Yes, the Supreme Court, Katherine Harris, Gore himself, etc. are all equally guilty on that score.)
«Clinton has blood on her hands for Iraq. But not even as much as, say, Ralph Nader.» Alas, Gregor, that comparison is absurd. Neither Mr Nader – whose campaign called for «wag[ing] peace with rigorous energy, mediation, anticipating conflicts abroad» – nor those who voted for him can reasonably be made responsible for the US war on Iraq ; to maintain such a stance is to blame the victim. Mr Nader’s several campaigns for president provided US voters with an opportunity to break a dysfunctional and dangerous duopolistic political system which has promoted, among other things, those military adventures abroad which have characterised US policy these last seven decades. Alas, given the nature of US political life, too few made use of that opportunity to make a difference, but the fault surely cannot be laid at the feet of Mr Nader….
Henri