[guest post by Dana]

A wise person once observed that it is “better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

Donald Trump is not that wise person:

Khizr Khan “has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution.”

–Dana

If you’re looking for a truth-teller, this is not your candidate:

Hillary Clinton claimed Sunday that FBI Director James Comey said statements she made about her use of a private email server as secretary of state “were truthful.”

The remarks came in an interview with “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace who challenged her on the claim.

I’ll put up video when I can find it.

Here is an extensive analysis that the AP did showing how Comey’s findings showed that Clinton lied about one thing after another regarding the emails. A few examples:

• CLINTON: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” News conference, March 2015.

  THE FACTS: Actually, the FBI identified at least 113 emails that passed through Clinton’s server and contained materials that were classified at the time they were sent, including some that were top secret and referred to a highly classified special access program, Comey said.

• CLINTON: “I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified.” NBC interview, July 2016.

  THE FACTS: [T]he private system did, in fact, handle emails that bore markings indicating they contained classified information, Comey said.

• CLINTON: “I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work related” to the State Department. News conference, March 2015.

  THE FACTS: Not so, the FBI found.

  Comey said that when his forensic team examined Clinton’s server it found there were “several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group of 30,000″ that had been returned by Clinton to the State Department.

• CLINTON: “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for personal emails instead of two.” News conference, March 2015.

  THE FACTS: …Clinton “used numerous mobile devices to view and send email” using her personal account, Comey said. He also said Clinton had used different servers.

And it goes on and on and on. The linked piece has many, many more contradictions between Clinton claims and Comey’s findings.

She is, put to it simply, a giant liar.

UPDATE: Larry O’Connor has the various video clips at this Hot Air post.

[guest post by Dana]

Two weeks, the Republican National Convention’s opening night theme was “Make America Safe Again”. Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, killed during the attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, gave a gut-wrenching speech in which she bared her grief and directly blamed Hillary Clinton for the loss of her son. She also argued that it was Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, who would keep our nation safe:

For all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the cynicism the tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton. I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son.

In an email to her daughter shortly after the attack, Hillary Clinton blamed it on terrorism.

But 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.

Since then, I have repeatedly asked Hillary Clinton to explain to me the real reason why my son is dead. I’m still waiting.

Whenever I called the State Department, no one would speak to me because they say I am “not a member of the immediate family.” Sean is my son.

Hillary Clinton is a woman, a mother and a grandmother of two. I am a woman, a mother and a grandmother of two. How could she do this to me? How could she do this to any American family? Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not.

…

And, when it comes to the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism, he will not hesitate to kill the terrorists who threaten American lives.
He will make America stronger, not weaker. This entire campaign comes down to a single question.

If Hillary Clinton … can’t give us the truth … why should we give her the presidency.

Reactions to Smith’s speech ranged from expected compassion to frustration that Hillary Clinton, who once called Smith a liar, has been given a pass on Benghazi.

But then there was also this from the non-partisan and unbiased media:

And this from Chris Matthews:

“I don’t understand why the Republicans would choose to put this on prime-time television when they have such wonderful stories of American heroism to speak to the American people,” an emotional Matthews said. “I think it was wrong.

“I don’t care what that woman up there, the mother, has felt. Her emotions are her own. But for the country in choosing a leader, it’s wrong to have someone get up there and tell a lie about Hillary Clinton. It’s not true. It’s logically not true. I think it’s wrong that they ruined their evening with this.”

Last week at the Democratic National Convention, with his wife standing quietly by his side, the father of U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan pushed back against Donald Trump’s plan to limit Muslim immigration in the U.S. as he emotionally shared about his son who died in Iraq while saving the lives of fellow soldiers in 2004:

Tonight we are honoured to stand here as parents of Captain Humayun Khan and as patriotic American Muslims – with undivided loyalty to our country.

Like many immigrants, we came to this country empty-handed. We believed in American democracy; that with hard work and goodness of this country, we could share in and contribute to its blessings.

…

Our son, Humayun, had dreams too, of being a military lawyer, but he put those dreams aside the day he sacrificed his life to save the lives of his fellow soldiers. Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son ‘the best of America’.

If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America. Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities; women; judges; even his own party leadership.

He vows to build walls, and ban us from this country. Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future.

Let me ask you: have you even read the United States constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. [he pulls it out] In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law’.

Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America.

You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.

We cannot solve our problems by building walls, sowing division. We are stronger together. And we will keep getting stronger when Hillary Clinton becomes our President.

In conclusion, I ask every patriot American, all Muslim immigrants, and all immigrants to not take this election lightly.

This is a historic election, and I request to honour the sacrifice of my son – and on election day, take the time to get out and vote.

And vote for the healer. vote for the strongest, most qualified candidate, Hillary Clinton, not the divider. God bless you, thank you.

With rare exception, Khizr Khan’s speech was sympathetically received by both sides of the aisle — meaning Democrats and the MSM on one side, and Republicans on the other. How could it not be? Who can judge the pain and grief of the Khans and their profound loss? And yet, that same measure of respect and sympathy was not extended to Patricia Smith. In the eyes of a biased media, Smith’s loss was simply not as profound as the Khan’s. And that’s because in the eyes of a media hungry for any opportunity to push a political bias, all grieving parents cannot be seen as equal.

To their shame, this double-standard response and eagerness to climb on top of the dead bodies of two fine Americans to push a partisan bias only further cements the mainstream media’s collective state of woeful disgrace and reveals that it is they who are but decomposing corpses.

–Dana

[guest post by JVW]

Here are a couple of items of interest we can discuss as the Democrats pack up and leave Philadelphia:

1. Chuck Todd and his enablers at NBC News fall all over themselves to salute the Democrats on a supposedly “powerful” convention. They contrast what they declare was a unified party front in Philadelphia with what they clearly believe was a mess in Cleveland. Bringing unctuousness to the appropriate heights to equal their elite level of asshattery, the authors write:

In totality, the Democratic convention itself was flawless — with two exceptions: 1) the Debbie Wasserman Schultz mess; and 2) the few dozen Sanders delegates who disrupted Clinton last night. Taken together, the two conventions matched the persona of their nominee: Cleveland was chaotic; Philadelphia was disciplined.

So everything was grand except for the fact that the head of the party had to be fired when it emerged that she and her lieutenants placed their thumb on the scale of the nominating process and when the supporters of the candidate who was hurt by that involvement raised justifiable complaints. Todd and his colleagues would no doubt tell us that the staging of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater was a success except for the unforeseen and random assassination of a President. Reading Todd’s grating flattery reminds me that a few days ago I took an MSNBC promo banner and made a few additions:

2. I mentioned last night how much I hated Hillary!’s wretched speech. I even took the bold move earlier this morning of actually listening to her deliver it in that nasally hectoring screeching voice that reminds you of your least favorite middle school teacher. It’s not just that her speech consisted of a bunch of vapid platitudes (“Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart.” “No one gets through life alone.”), it’s that it sounded like she was reciting it to a group of adolescents of middling intelligence. So I thought it might be interesting to run her speech through the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Formula test to see exactly what grade level at which she pegged her stilted oratory. For fun, I also thought it would be interesting to subject the Republican Party nominee’s convention address to the same test. You only have to import the transcript into Microsoft Word, and in the settings on the Spelling and Grammar function you can set it to peg the Flesh-Kincaid level of the text. Here’s what came up:

So there you have it. The Democrat nominee speaks to her rapt following as if they were sixth-graders. That explains a lot about how the party feels about its voters, does it not? The GOP nominee speaks to them as high school freshmen. To put it into perspective, the Gettysburg Address registers at an eleventh-grade level.

Some other fun facts: Barack Obama’s address in Philadelphia came in at a seventh-grade level, Michelle Obama’s speech fell between a ninth and tenth-grade level, and Ted Cruz’s speech in Cleveland was at a seventh-grade level. Make of that what you will. (Interestingly enough, I could not find an online transcript of Bill Clinton’s speech in Philadelphia. If anyone finds it, feel free to run the test and let us know where it stands.)

– JVW

So you really don’t have to be a jerk to your friends because they’re not voting the way you would like.

No individual vote ever matters in a presidential election. We learned this in Florida 2000. If it’s close enough that your vote could theoretically matter — which is far less likely than your winning the lottery — a swarm of Democrats will swoop in and start reinterpreting the votes of people who could not vote competently to begin with. The brief moment when your vote seemed to matter will pass, and your vote will be swallowed up in all the phony reinterpreted votes.

So your vote simply doesn’t matter. To use the language of the beloved alt-right: you are “virtue-signaling” by announcing for whom you will vote. Some of you are signaling the virtue of being on the team or part of the tribe. Some of you are signaling the virtue of adherence to abstract principle rather than group membership.

But none of it really matters. So just relax.

The GOP has a post titled Doug Elmets: Not Really A Republican because “Elmets Has Contributed To A Number Of Democrats In The Last Twelve Years.”

Who wants to tell them?

Meanwhile, caption this.

[guest post by JVW]

Are you serious? Are you absolutely serious? There was no way on God’s Green Earth that I was going to subject myself to the blarney that Hillary! Rodham Clinton (the Once and Future. . . and all that) vomited on the stage in Philadelphia in real time. And yes, I got drunk instead and am only now reading the transcript (though, I promise you, I am having fun trying to hear it in my mind in her awful honking voice that pushes me to move from the beer to the gin). But let me make a snap judgement based upon the transcript: this was awful, this was the Clintonian mixture of puffery and horseshit, and there is no way that his hodgepodge of garbage will move the needle on her likability.

In reading the transcript of her speech, I swear to God this was the most unambiguous pile of excrement ever let loose by a major candidate. I missed by miles the idea that she might at least make allusion to her well-known foibles and at least address the idea that 57% of the country dislikes her. All of you who bet the Hillary Hiding! at 4:1 win. She is so truly awful that it defies explanation.

Yeah, I have been pretty open as to why (along with our host and some other co-bloggers) I won’t vote for the GOP nominee, but for the life of me I can’t ever take seriously someone who votes for this woman who is singularly the worst major party nominee who has ever been forwarded for consideration.

– JVW

Scrub:

The professional website of Melania Trump, wife of the Republican presidential nominee, has apparently been deleted from the internet as of Wednesday afternoon.

The disappearance of Trump’s elaborate website comes just days after news outlets, including The Huffington Post, raised serious questions about whether she actually earned an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Ljubljana, which is in Trump’s native Slovenia. Her online biography claimed she had, but a book about her life published earlier this year says she left the university after one year so she could pursue a modeling career.

Melania Trump, an adult, put herself in the spotlight by giving a speech at the GOP convention in which she plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech. (Melania laundered Obama’s words through a Trump stooge who was somehow made to seem the guilty party, because the plagiarized words passed across the stooge’s desk after coming from Melania and then returning to Melania — who delivered the lifted passages knowing they were Michelle Obama’s.)

Melania Trump’s accomplishments include being a reasonably pretty woman who married a rich old white con artist, knowingly plagiarizing a speech, and now lying about her educational record. Commence treating me as if I am the jerk for noticing.

P.S. No, Trumpers, this is hardly that important a story. Trump’s and Clinton’s lies matter far more. As you go searching for a sufficiently large rock with which to stone me, contemplate how you have studiously focused on The Real Issues over the years, never once saying a word about Michelle Obama, ever. Your selfless dedication to sticking to The Real Issues is nothing short of a miracle, dear Trumpers, and a testament to what great people you truly are!

I am old enough to remember when the epitome of a clueless old white guy politician was Joe Biden. Now, Joe Biden stands on the floor of the Democrat convention and says things like this about another clueless old white guy politician:

“He [Donald Trump] has no clue about what makes America great,” Biden continued, adding, “Actually, he has no clue period.” At this point Biden’s speech was interrupted by enthusiastic delegates chanting, “Not a clue.”

Biden also talked about foreign policy saying, “No major party nominee in the history of this nation has ever known less or has been less prepared to deal with our national security.”

It’s remarkable that we have come to the point where we hear these things said by Joe Biden . . . and instead of saying: “You have got to be kidding me! You’re saying that about someone else?” our natural reaction is instead to shrug and say: “He’s not wrong.”

Here’s what he actually said:

Donald Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing." https://t.co/f522S7Tn0F

— CNN (@CNN) July 27, 2016

Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you would probably be rewarded mightily by our press.

This was followed up by a similar tweet:

If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2016

Now here is how Big Media portrayed the Con Man’s comments:

Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton’s email — Politico (cached link; no links for bullies)

Donald Trump to Russia: hack and publish Hillary Clinton’s ‘missing’ emails — Guardian

Donald Trump Calls on Russia to Hack Hillary Clinton’s Emails — Time

Donald Trump Calls on Russia to Hack Hillary Clinton’s Email — US Weekly

Bullshit. Hillary, remember, wiped her server. With a cloth, some say! So there’s nothing left to hack. Trump was just saying: if you have the emails, release them.

The Washington Post has corrected their original headline — “Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton’s emails” — to “Trump invites Russia to meddle in the U.S. presidential race with Clinton’s emails.” Here is the original headline:

NPR has corrected its original headline — “Trump Calls On Russia To Hack Into Clinton’s Emails” — to “Clinton Campaign Says Trump Encouraged Espionage With Hacking Comment.” Here is the original headline:

How is it that so many outlets rushed to accuse Trump of asking the Russians to “hack” Hillary, and then (in some cases) decided to backtrack? Well, because that was the Democrat spin, you see.

Clinton’s senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan said in an emailed statement: “This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent. That’s not hyperbole, those are just the facts. This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue.”

Yeah, that’s not the facts. That’s just hyperbole.

I feel absolutely no obligation to defend Donald Trump. Screw Donald Trump. I think what he did here — essentially laugh at the possibility that Russia might have hacked the emails of the Secretary of State — is typical Trump irresponsibility. Although his comments were nowhere near as irresponsible as the decisions made by the former Secretary of State that put these emails at risk.

The left flipped out about this so much that they were even talking about how Trump should be charged with a felony for musing about Russia and the emails. But unless Stupidity in the First Degree is an actual felony, they should be talking about charging the candidate who actually committed a crime with respect to these emails.