At a campaign event in Iowa last week, Ted Cruz’s father and top campaign surrogate Rafael Cruz declared that the U.S. military is now under the leadership of “puppet generals” because President Obama fired “all the generals that were strong on the military.”
At a briefing hosted by the Iowa conservative blog Caffeinated Thoughts, Rafael Cruz recalled his son’s interaction with then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, one of these “puppet generals,” at a 2014 Senate Armed Services Committee meeting in which Cruz demanded that Dempsey come up with a plan to defeat ISIS in 90 days. (In his remarks, Rafael Cruz mistakenly referred to it as a Judiciary Committee meeting.)
“You know, Ted Cruz was on the Judiciary Committee talking to one of these puppet generals that Obama has put in power because he has forced to retire or fired all the generals that were strong on the military, and he’s got all these puppet generals. And he was asking one of these puppet generals, ‘What do we have to do to destroy ISIS in 90 days?’ This general said, ‘Well, it is impossible to destroy ISIS in 90 days, all we can do is manage them.’”
Rafael Cruz said that, in contrast, under a future President Ted Cruz, “America will again have the strongest military in the world and the rules of engagement will change.”
This prompted him to go on a tangent about gun laws, falsely claiming that gun-free zones invite mass shootings. “You’ve got military personnel in the base that cannot even carry a weapon, that’s why we’ve had the massacres we’ve had,” he said. “Even in the schools, you know, let me tell you something, all of the people that are committing these massacres are a bunch of cowards. They will only go to gun-free zones.”
