After seeing this tweet from Jeb!, I almost feel sorry for him. After all this is someone who (however wrong he is on many issues) set out to run a more-or-less serious campaign.
America. pic.twitter.com/TeduJkwQF3
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) February 16, 2016
In other Campaign 2016 news:
· Ted Cruz has vowed, as president, to do away with “politically correct” gluten-free meals for members of the military.
“That’s why the last thing any commander should need to worry about is the grades he is getting from some plush-bottomed Pentagon bureaucrat for political correctness or social experiments—or providing gluten-free MREs,” Cruz said, using the shorthand term for Meal, Ready-to-Eat, CNN reported.
About 1% of Americans have celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that makes a person intolerant to gluten, according to the Celiac Disease Foundation. A spokesman for the Department of Defense said the provision of gluten-free meals differs based on the military branch.
Unless the military is prepared to screen out gluten-intolerant recruits, forcing them to eat food with gluten would be a blow against “political correctness” at the expense of military effectiveness.
Even after Ted Nugent posted this antisemitic trash and after it was reported that pastor Mike Bickle proclaimed that Hitler was a “hunter” sent by God to kill the Jews for rejecting Jesus, Cruz’s campaign website still trumpets Nugent’s and Bickle’s endorsements.
· In a 1997 interview Donald Trump– whom the pope suggests is “not a Christian”– compared the dangers he faced while dating in New York City (what with STDs) to the dangers faced by combat soldiers in the Vietnam war. Trump, needless to say, never served in the military, in Vietnam or anywhere else, and has also got away (more recently) with denigrating the war record of Senator John McCain, who endured six years as a POW in North Vietnam.
Trump, meanwhile, continues to challenge Republican orthodoxy in other ways: by pointing out that George W. Bush was president on 9/11 and by saying that GOP bete noire Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things” unrelated to abortion.
· Marco Rubio has taken some ridicule for a campaign ad that shows the skyline of Vancouver, Canada, as an announcer intones, “It’s morning again in America.”
In fact if you watch the whole ad, a dystopian vision of America’s future if a Democrat is elected president this year, it’s probably a subtle reference to the danger of the USA becoming more like Canada– with its universal health care, reasonably affordable higher education, etc.
(As a warning about a Democratic dystopia, Rubio’s ad is not quite up to the sheer horror of Rick Santorum’s Obamaville ad from 2012– even though it also invokes a forlorn playground swing.)
· Perhaps most troubling of all (according to some), Hillary Clinton barked like a dog.
