America

Last week, the “teflon Don” took a hit in Iowa.

Despite the fact that the last Des Moines Register poll before the caucus showed the brazen billionaire pulling ahead of Ted Cruz in the state for the first time since August, Donald Trump lost, in what many deemed a surprising outcome.

Initially, Trump congratulated Cruz. Later, he called the senator a cheater and accused him of “stealing” the state by bilking the hapless Ben Carson out of votes.

I received an e-mail from a friend who is a Harvard graduate and an orthodox Catholic. He takes exception to R.R. Reno’s column on meritocracy, which I cited favorably today. I can’t reproduce his letter verbatim here, because he wants to protect his privacy. But I have edited it to his satisfaction, and present this version with his approval:

I watched several times the entire NSFW 1:53 clip of Trump calling Ted Cruz a p**sy for having constitutional qualms about waterboarding. It doesn’t get any better when repeated. The thing that most people are talking about is his use of the vulgarity, which is pretty lowlife stuff coming from a man who wants to sit in the Oval Office. But by far the more disturbing thing was that he was calling Cruz this as a way of asserting his own willingness to torture people, and the Constitution be damned.

Ron Paul has slammed plans for a “mandatory depression screening” for all Americans – which is currently being proposed by the United States Preventive Services Task Force.  Ron Paul says that these mandatory screenings will allow the government to keep a big brother style central database that lists every ‘mentally ill’ person in America, which could then be used to deprive individuals of their Second Amendment rights.

Earlier this year, Seymour Hersh, America’s leading investigative journalist, published an intriguing article on U.S. policy towards the growing conflict in Syria and Iraq. “Military to Military,” which appeared in the London Review of Books, maintains that the Pentagon’s intelligence analysts have, since 2013, been advising against the White House policy of removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, arguing that it would create a power vacuum in the country that would inevitably be exploited by groups like ISIS.