A doctor’s plea on Syria, a Dem pollster’s warning to Hillary, and other notable commentary

A doctor’s plea: President Obama, Please Save Syria
Samer Attar, a Chicago surgeon who does volunteer work in Syria, says each trip there is to “descend into the lower depths of hell.” In Aleppo, he writes in The Washington Post, “the road smells of burned metal and rotten flesh.” And in the hospital where he works, “scalpels are dull, anesthesia is a luxury, sterility is an approximation,” while “children covered in blood and dust and pockmarked with shrapnel screamed.” So he’s pleading with President Obama to “boldly confront Russia to halt the bombardment of . . . the only humanitarian supply line to hundreds of thousands of people.” And the Syrian government must be shown “that the world will act upon a red line against its disproportionate crimes and atrocities.”

Dem pollster: Hillary and Her Party Should Worry
Former Bill Clinton pollster Doug Schoen says Donald Trump’s acceptance speechshould have Hillary Clinton worried. It wasn’t a great piece of oratory, he writes atFoxNews.com, and it didn’t “broaden the base of the party significantly.” What it did do, though — “and did very well — was to raise the stakes of the election and define it in his own terms.” Specifically, he identified law and order, crime and terrorism as the central challenges America faces and outlined the need for change: “Trump’s remarks were directed at the 70-odd percent of Americans who feel the country is on the wrong track,” particularly “in the swing states of the industrial Midwest.”
Libertarian view: It’s Peter Thiel’s Party Now
Forget Donald Trump’s speech or daughter Ivanka’s — “the most intriguing, original and ultimately most optimistic speech” at Thursday night’s convention was given by Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel, says Roger Simon at PJ Media. He identified himself as proudly gay and Republican, and “the audience gave him a standing ovation.” That alone, writes Simon, “would seem to be a game-changer in Republican politics.” Certainly, “the conventional liberal narrative about the GOP took a serious body blow.” In fact, he says, “liberals and progressives” — with their “worldview out of 1932” — “are the true fuddy-duddies of our time, more conservative than conservatives.”
Twitter wars: Banned Milo is No Free-Speech Martyr
Breitbart blogger-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been permanently banned from Twitter after a vicious online exchange with “Ghostbusters” actress Leslie Jones — and that has people either jeering or cheering. The former see it as politically correct censorship, while the latter are hailing it as a sign of Twitter’s new accountability. But Jesse Singal in New York magazine says both sides are wrong: “Yiannopoulos is no free-speech martyr, and cheerleaders of the ban are likely fooling themselves if they interpret this” as a new Twitter policy “rather than a specific instance of damage control that’s unlikely to lead to wider reforms.”

Diction wars: Dems, GOP Speak Different Languages
Republicans and Democrats have become more sharply polarized over policy in recent decades. But Derek Thompson in The Atlantic says they’re also “divided by a common language” — using different, politically loaded terms for the same issues. It began with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract With America, which spoke, for example,” of “tax relief” instead of “tax cuts.” That “kicked off a neologism arms race, a prolonged attempt by members of both parties to coin catchy new terms for their pet policies, particularly for taxes, immigration and health care.” And that, he warns, is the reduction of crises into “a diction contest” — “a sign that both parties are predominantly interested not in converting the other side, but rather in speaking to the converted flock.”
New York Post