For several days, the media has been gushing about Khizr Kahn’s emotional speech — and his forceful denunciation of GOP nominee Donald Trump — at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia. Kahn’s son, 27-year-old Army captain Humayun Khan, was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004.
Trump has managed to keep the story alive because he couldn’t resist getting involved in a public feud with the father of a fallen soldier. He’s been condemned by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and many of his fellow Republicans. It’s not a great look.
Mr. Khan, who does not know me, viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over T.V. doing the same – Nice!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2016
One cannot help but notice, however, the difference between the media’s reaction to Mr. Khan’s speech at the DNC and the speech that Patricia Smith, whose son was killed in the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, gave at the Republican convention one week earlier. Fighting back tears, Smith accused Hillary Clinton of lying to her face about the circumstances of her son’s death.
The GOP was slammed in the press for “exploiting” Smith’s grief, or as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called her, “that woman.” It was widely agreed that putting a grieving mother on stage at a political convention to attack the opposing candidate showed poor taste. Smith’s speech was not praised as “brave” or “powerful” or “heartrending.”
Democrats, on the other hand, were never criticized for “exploiting” the Khan family’s grief or for “politicizing” a tragedy. Because they don’t seem to have a problem when tragedies are politicized in order to attack Republicans.
