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The Republican candidates in South Carolina have spent the last week beating each other up over their supposed untrustworthiness. This has had particular impact on Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who runs under the slogan "TrusTED" and talks ad infinitum about his consistently conservative record. Polls show that the charges against Cruz have slowed his ascent in South Carolina. Meanwhile, Cruz slaps Republican frontrunner Donald Trump for his alleged lies on the campaign trail to conservative voters; Trump denounces those accusations and doubles down on the charge that Cruz is the true liar. And then there's Marco Rubio, sniping at Cruz...

Donald Trump crossed the line at the last Republican debate — twice: when he blamed President George W. Bush for 9/11, and when he bought into the “Bush lied” lie about the Iraq War. “The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush,” Trump said, because the president “didn’t listen to the advice of his CIA.” Sorry: The CIA missed it coming, as did the rest of the US intelligence community. The feds failed to connect the dots and ferret out the terrorists before they struck. But al Qaeda actually grew — and planned the attack —...

In Saturday's Republican debate, Donald Trump, in discussing the Iraq war, accused President George W. Bush and his administration of lying to get the United States into the Iraq war. "You call it whatever you want. I wanna tell you. They lied," according to Trump. "They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction." That charge itself is a lie or, at minimum, a libel, and quite an extraordinary one at that... Whether or not Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination, I don't know. But...

Here's the story. Not long after 9/11, the World Trade Center Business Recovery Grant program was established to help small businesses recover and rebuild. The program disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars through a New York state development corporation in the years following the attacks... ...the New York Daily News ran an investigative piece about how the program had awarded grants to companies and subsidiaries that hardly seemed like "small businesses." Among them were Dell, Morgan Stanley, and, yes, Donald Trump... ...as Trump said immediately following 9/11, none of his properties were directly damaged by the attack on the World...

Among the two candidates whose results look at all like those of an eventual GOP presidential nominee, polling suggests that Ted Cruz would do significantly better than Donald Trump in the general election. According to the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls, Cruz would fare 5 points better versus Hillary Clinton than Trump would. Polling has consistently shown Cruz to have an advantage over Trump in this regard: Fox News found that Cruz would fare 4 points better than Trump, beating Clinton by 7 points (50 to 43 percent) to Trump's 3 (47 to 44 percent). NBC News and...

Welcome to Infomercial America, or, if you prefer, the United States of Spam. Whenever political conspiracy theories break out into the open, pundits and intellectuals name-check the brilliant but flawed essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter. Under President George W. Bush, the "9/11 Truthers" were the poster boys and girls of the paranoid style. Others hinted that the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina might have been deliberate. Under President Obama, it was the "Birthers." A related theory was that Obama is a secret Muslim. A generation before that, it was the John Birch Society...

Something unexpected is happening in the Republican presidential field. Leading GOP candidates once denied the reality of manmade climate change, but now they seem to be softening their posture and subtly embracing it. Take the case of Donald Trump. His denial of climate change has been a centerpiece of his act for years. In tweets between 2012 and early 2015, he called climate change a "con job," a "canard," a "hoax," "bulls**t," and a concept "created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." But as his political star has risen, he’s changed his tune on...

Like Donkey Kong. Ted Cruz scored a surprising third-place finish in New Hampshire in yesterday's first-in-the-nation primary, and now it looks like he's going for a knockout before South Carolina. Cruz tweeted out the campaign's latest web ad after his victory, one that takes aim at the winner, Donald Trump. The ad depicts children playing with their new "Donald Trump action figure," and says what he does most is "pretend to be a Republican"... It's a tour de force of counter-Trump arguments. The ad manages to mention Trump's friendship with Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid (and adds in...

Hey Trumpsters/Breitbart/Drudge... talking to you here: How the hell can you continue to support such a fowl-mouthed, disingenuous boor like Donald Trump? For President of the United States of America...?  There is nothing so d__n special about him that compels you -or anybody- to put up with this kind of language, tone, and monumental dishonesty. He's not a conservative, he's not a good Christian, and he's obviously not even a good role model... the televised, public rallies could be rated R.  Donald Trump has absolutely no right to talk and act like this- the guy is simply way out of line.  What kind...

Politics is a full-contact sport, but it's not OK to hit below the belt. Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio spent last week blaming frontrunner Sen. Ted Cruz for a problem that originated from Team Carson's own disorganization—even after media records and Iowa exit poll data cleared Cruz. Before you vote in your primary, you deserve the truth. "You don't have to be a politician to tell the truth," Carson quipped in a recent debate. No, you don't. So let's start telling the truth. Unless you’re now a politician. Carson finished 4th in the February 1 Iowa caucus. Cruz...

The Latest on the 2016 presidential campaign (all times local): --------------------------- 11:05 p.m. Donald Trump says the dispute over Iowa's caucus results, in which he finished second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is yesterday's news and he's more focused on the next race. Trump, who on Wednesday was accusing Cruz of election fraud and calling for an Iowa do-over, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that he's so focused on the Feb. 9 contest in New Hampshire that "I don't care about that anymore." Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday that "based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa...

The liberty movement must help elect Senator Ted Cruz the next President of the United States. Many of us in the liberty movement saw the handwriting on the wall some time ago, as far as the Rand Paul campaign was concerned. He came in a distant fifth in Iowa, a state many thought he would win a year ago. His polling looked bleak in the other early states, and he was short on resources. He likely could have gone on, but instead, suspended his campaign Wednesday morning. He'll focus on securing re-election to the Senate, which he should easily accomplish....

Donald Trump should bounce back in New Hampshire on Tuesday. His loss in Iowa at the hands of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was a setback, although it actually could have done Trump some good. But Trump cannot afford two losses in a row. You can always learn something from defeat. And a little humility never hurt anyone, and Trump, who is not used to losing, sure could use some. And he surprisingly flashed a little of it when he graciously congratulated Cruz, the man he had called a liar, on his first-place finish. But Trump still could not help himself...

GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump says Sen. Ted Cruz is a "total liar" for labeling him an advocate of expanded Obamacare or universal national health care along the lines being touted by democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential contest. During an appearance on ABC's This Week on Sunday Trump insisted he would dismantle the Affordable Care Act if he is elected president and stressed that he doesn't favor a "single payer" universal government program that essentially would provide Medicare coverage for all. Yet despite the blustery real estate tycoon's protests about Cruz's characterizations, Trump espoused a form...

Little Rock, Arkansas Donald Trump, in a tit-for-tat with his chief rival coming out of Iowa, accused Texas Sen. Ted Cruz of bearing direct responsibility for the Affordable Care Act."Ted Cruz gave us Obamacare," Trump said at a Wednesday rally in Little Rock, Arkansas.The line of attack invoked the landmark health care law that is anathema to many conservatives. Cruz, for his part, has accused Trump of supporting Obamacare, too, accusing Trump as holding the same position on healthcare as Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Trump's rationale for his claim is a little roundabout. It's based on the fact that...

For the liberal media, there might not be a greater hate object than Texas Senator Ted Cruz. The consistent conservative’s win in Iowa and rise in the polls will probably mean even more heightened attacks from journalists. Which would be remarkable, given liberals in the chattering class have already compared him to Nazis, the KKK and even pointed a figurative gun to his head. The following is a collection of the Worst Media Attacks on Ted Cruz (so far): ...

Disgusting. The Cruz camp is slandering Donald Trump tonight at the GOP caucuses. The Cruz precinct captain Tim Osborne smeared Trump tonight in Des Moines saying Trump was for abortion and amnesty just six months ago. Six months ago Donald Trump was already running for president. And he’s reading his talking points. It looks like the Cruz folks will stop at nothing. Sad.