Charles Krauthammer: Where is Ted Cruz now?
By LUCY MCCALMONT | 10/10/13 1:30 PM EDT
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer continued his criticism of Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday, asking, “Where is he now?”
“How exactly was he going to achieve abolition of Obamacare? Explain that to me. Has he ever explained it? And where is he now?” Krauthammer said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”
Krauthammer, who has previously hit Cruz (R-Texas) on the strategy of shutdown to defund Obamacare, included Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) in his questioning and said the two went home to “have lunch.”
“I mean his sidekick, Sen. [Mike] Lee said, ‘Oh, we’re past Obamacare. We moved on.’ These are the generals who lead people into the Battle of [the] Little Bighorn and then go home and have lunch and leave the troops out there? Where are they? Where are the generals? What’s their strategy to get abolition of Obamacare?” Krauthammer said.
Krauthammer did emphasize while he is on the ideological side of repealing Obamacare, there was no strategy laid out by Cruz.
“I argued [to repeal Obamacare] in ’09 and ’10. I argued it every week in my writing, on television … all of us were in the trenches. Cruz arrives on the scene and pretends he’s just begun the fight against Obamacare,” Krauthammer said.
He continued, “I’ve been calling this the ‘kamikaze brigade’… ‘the suicide caucus.’ I’m all for charging the barricades, but you’ve got to show me how to penetrate them. … And people are saying Republicans are in retreat. They’re not in retreat, there never was a way to abolish Obamacare now,” Krauthammer said.
Ingraham also expressed her frustration.
“I’m with Cruz in spirit, I like the fact that he’s fighting, but I think we could’ve achieved real victory on the delay and the ‘no Washington’ exemption,” she said.
Ingraham cited a Washington Post story that included conservative Cruz criticism from Grover Norquist.
“I think it was very possible for us to delay the implementation of Obamacare for a year until Cruz came along and crashed and burned,” Norquist told the Post.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/charles-krauthammer-ted-cruz-obamacare-98144.html#ixzz2hRWH0CDh |
