On Tuesday’s The Kelly File, Senator Ted Cruz took exception to a question about whether he would deport all 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States as a “liberal journalist” question. Kelly asked the Texas Republican “if you have a husband and a wife who are illegal immigrants and they have two children who are here who are American citizens, would you deport all of them? Would you deport the American citizen children?” 

Politics involves the heart and the mind, and in general the best politicians appeal to both. Then there’s Donald Trump. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine argues that Trump’s campaign is pretty close to mindless, but it seems that to many rank-and-file Republicans, that’s a feature rather than a bug.

“Outsiders have struggled to comprehend how Republican voters can attach themselves to an economic agenda so plainly at odds with their own interest, or whip themselves into a frenzy over a manufactured outrage,” wrote Chait in a Tuesday post. “Trump embodies that mysterious X factor that has eluded analysts of all sides…Trump is not the spokesman for an idea at all, but the representation of undifferentiated resentment.”

Carol Costello took great offense to an ad from Ted Cruz showing the Texas senator humorously cooking bacon on a machine gun. Tuesday on CNN Newsroom, the host argued “we no longer respect our weapons. We forget that guns can actually kill.” Costello lamented “America’s cavalier attitude toward guns” and thought Cruz’s ad may have crossed the line. 

On Thursday, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three networks and the two leading Spanish-language networks ignored the latest developments in the now 813 day-old IRS targeting scandal. As usual, only Fox News covered a congressional hearing on, in Fox's words, "the lack of accountability following the IRS targeting of tea party and other groups" as well as a federal judge's threat "to hold (IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and Justice Department attorneys in contempt of court for failing to produce status reports and Lois Lerner e-mails."

Not that this excuses the non-coverage, but if these outfits were relying as subscribers on the Associated Press to make sure that the contempt threat made by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan got the visibility it deserved so they would be aware of it and use it, the wire service's Stephen Ohlemacher let them down — and, I would argue, deliberately so.

The “big three” networks of ABC, CBS and NBC gleefully promoted on Monday evening President Obama’s “scolding” of 2016 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee over his criticism of the Iran deal and his “scathing words” for the GOP field as candidates “are trying to out-trump [Donald] Trump.” Not surprisingly, the networks also sided with then-candidate Obama on May 15, 2008 when the same three networks chided then-President George W. Bush and fellow Republicans for a “two-pronged Republican attack” on Obama.