As the kerfuffle about Donald Trump’s reaction to the speech by Khizr Khan at the Democratic National Convention gathered steam over the weekend, Hillary Clinton repeated her slander that somehow the families of the Benghazi dead were lying when they said she told them in front of their son’s caskets they died because of a video. This time she didn’t say “liar”, but that their grief made them misunderstand her:    

Over the weekend, Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton accused two Benghazi families of "not understanding her" the day bodies of the Americans killed in Benghazi were returned home. This wasn't the first time Clinton essentially called Charles Woods, father of Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, and Pat Smith, mother of information officer Sean Smith, liars. Woods and Smith say Clinton told them a video was to blame for the Benghazi attack, not terrorism. Clinton disagrees but "doesn't hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said."

"My heart goes out to both of them. Losing a child under any circumstances, especially in this case, two State Department employees, extraordinary men both of them, two CIA contractors gave their lives protecting our country, our values. I understand the grief and the incredible sense of loss that can motivate that. As other members of families who lost loved ones have said, that’s not what they heard, I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said," Clinton said to Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace over the weekend.

In her patronizing monotone, Hillary essentially said the Benghazi families were not only liars but stupid as well, badly in need of a copy of English for Dummies. Now, Ghazala Khan, Khizr’s wife and whose son gave his life for his country in Iraq, is a Gold Star mom deserving of our respect. Her silence at the convention should be interpreted as nothing more than grief, and Donald Trump would have been wise not to rise to the media bait. But Patricia Smith, Charles Woods and other relatives of the Benghazi dead belong to Gold Star families as well. Where is their respect and media condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s callousness and serial lying about them and the terrorist attack that killed their sons? As Howard Kurtz, Fox News media analyst, points out:

There is no question that Khan, whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, provided a heartbreaking moment in Philadelphia. Trump had nothing to do with his son’s wartime death, of course, but Khan took his proposed temporary ban on Muslim immigrants and used it to question whether the candidate has even read the Constitution (which Trump says he has).

The media have given this man and his wife an enormous platform -- in a way they conspicuously declined to do when Patricia Smith blamed Hillary Clinton at the Republican convention for the death of her son in Benghazi.

Khan’s speech got a writeup on the front page of the New York Times. On Sunday he was on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” calling Trump, among other things, a “black soul.” Yesterday it was the “Today” show, “Morning Joe” and “New Day.”

Charles Wood, the equally grieving father of Tyrone Woods, who, along with Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Ambassador Christopher Stevens, died in the Benghazi terrorist attack, says he did not misunderstand what Hillary told him in front of his son’s casket:

This morning on America's Newsroom, Charles Woods again explained his version of events and didn't hold back about what Clinton did or said.

"She stood in front of my son's casket and blamed the rage directed at American embassies on a video she said we had no part of," Woods said. "When they had the casket ceremony she also lied to the American public. These are her words as best as I can recall, 'rage was directed at American embassies as a result of that awful video that we were not responsible for. She said basically the same thing in private to the families that were grieving and then a half hour later she said basically the same thing as far as causation to the American public."  

Jim Geraghty, writing in National Review, notes the glaring disparity in the treatments of Ghazala Khan and Patricia Smith:

Hey, remember when the first night of the Republican convention featured Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, one of the Americans slain in Benghazi? Remember how her speech was called a “cynical exploitation of grief”? Or the  “unabashed exploitation of private people’s grief” or “the weaponization of grief”? Remember how she “ruined the evening”? How it was, “a spectacle so offensive, it was hard to even comprehend”? How some liberal commentators said, “Mrs. Smith was really most interested in drinking blood rather than healing”? How her speech represented an “early dip into the gutter”? Remember how a GQ writer publicly expressed a desire to beat her to death?

Patricia Smith was said to be a “grieving unhinged mother” that was exploited for political gain. Ghazala Khan was treated as the second coming of Cindy Sheehan, the Code Pink poster mom who the media slavishly covered as she encamped outside the Bush family ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Patricia Smith understood and understands Hillary perfectly. As Patricia Smith said in her riveting convention speech:

“I know a few things could’ve been done to prevent it. But nobody’s admitting to anything. Right now, my understanding is Hillary didn’t do a damn thing. And I wonder what she did as Secretary of State, because she disavows everything. She disavows the fact that she even got any call for security... If this is her Department, she certainly doesn’t know how to run the Department. And she lied the whole time. She lied to me and called me a liar on TV,” Smith continues.

“She told me it was the fault of the video… And later when I mentioned that, she said she never said anything like that to me. How can a woman be this way!

“She said ‘One of us is a liar, and it wasn’t me,’” Smith recalls Hillary saying on air later.

“I am not a liar! I know what Hillary told me! In fact… I’ve spoken to quite a few different people – Hillary and Obama, Panetta, Susan Rice, and several others… every one of them told me it was the fault of the video, including Obama – and he denies it!

“Please, tell the world. Tell the world what she’s really like.”

We’ll try, Mrs. Smith. But it will be hard to be heard above the din of media hypocrites and their double standards who are more interested in protecting Hillary and trashing Trump than conveying the truth about one of the great hoaxsters in American political history.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.