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Political corruption is rife in US: American author

Khizr Khan holds his personal copy of the US Constitution while addressing delegates on the fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention at Wells Fargo Center on July 28, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (AFP)

Political corruption is rampant in the United States as the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties are corrupt, says a political commentator.

“Here in the United States, we are living under a very very sick and corrupt system, all of our leadership of both major parities is corrupt,” Kevin Barrett told Press TV on Monday.

He made the remarks when asked about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump who made disparaging comments about the mother of a slain US soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Trump belittled the parents of Captain Humayun Khan, whose father addressed the Democratic National Convention last Thursday night, denouncing the business mogul as unpatriotic and selfish over his divisive rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims.

Trump responded, in part, by suggesting that Ghazala Khan, the mother of the soldier, was silent during her husband’s speech at the DNC because she was not “allowed” to speak.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post published on Sunday, Ghazala Khan said that she did not intend to speak during the convention because she would get emotional.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for US president, accused Trump of scapegoating Humayun’s parents.

Clinton said Sunday that Trump had been insulting a family who had sacrificed so much for their country.

Barret said “this brouhaha over the scandalous, bigoted remarks of Trump on both sides seem to take for granted this notion that anyone who fought in Iraq is a hero,” while, he noted, the Iraq War like the Vietnam War was "a criminal war of aggression," in which the American soldiers "were generally aware that they were on the wrong side of that war and that their only intelligent move was to do everything they could to stay alive and get home and not kill the innocent Vietnamese who were defending themselves courageously and the same is true in Iraq.”

So “we have both major parties essentially agreeing that people who participate in criminal wars of aggression... are heroes,” he said, adding that "fifty years from now if humanity is still around, they will look back at the period and they will shake their heads and wonder what kind of human beings were alive in a time of such unbelievable levels of lying and corruption.”


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