No one could be more surprised than Donald Trump that his confrontation with the parents of a Muslim soldier killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq has turned into a political conflagration. Democrats and Republicans alike are criticizing him. Lindsey Graham, as one example, says “unacceptable” doesn’t begin to cover it. And to this point, anyway, Trump’s usual defenses haven’t been working. Via The New York Times.
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Ghazala Khan, the Gold Star mother of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, writes in The Washington Post a response to Trump, who questioned why she didn’t talk when she and her husband took the stage at the Democratic National Convention. Trump, she writes, “doesn’t know what sacrifice means.”
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E.J. Dionne says that the choice could not be more clear. Republicans either have to repudiate Trump’s cruelty to the family of a fallen U.S. soldier or they risk tarnishing themselves for a generation. Via The Washington Post.
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Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, has been a major player in Ukrainian politics for years — at least when he wasn’t busy doing deals with business tycoons in Urkraine and Russia. The question now is how much Manafort has influenced Trump’s defense of Russian interference in Ukraine. Via The New York Times.
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What does the Democratic Party stand for? It’s a very good question, but the answer isn’t exactly clear. Via The New Republic.
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Frank Bruni: It was Selina Meyer who made famous the campaign slogan, “Continuity with Change.” Of course Meyer is a fictional character, and a famously cynical one at that, in the HBO show “Veep.” But it might as well be Hillary Clinton’s slogan in running against Donald Trump. Via The New York Times.
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Long read from Jill Lepore in The New Yorker: A tale of two conventions and a question as old as the Republic: Who are the people and who speaks for them?
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A lesson from the conventions: Democrats and Republicans both think their states are great— but for entirely different reasons. Via Vox.
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Campus carry comes to the Texas, on the 50th anniversary of Charles Whitman’s shooting rampage at the University of Texas. Via Time.
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The case against the media — by the media. It’s disturbingly convincing. Via New York magazine.
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