The Wall Street Journal says Sen. Marco Rubio is the best pick when it comes to national security, and is comparing his rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, to President Obama when it comes to defeating terrorism.
The conservative paper’s editorial board praised Rubio this week for supporting a supposedly nuanced approach to defeating the Islamic State, one that calls for faction-building in the Middle East. The board then dismissed Cruz’s approach, saying that his bomb-them-all strategy is as just as unworkable as the White House’s current plan.
“The bomb-them-and-come-home line is the easier political case, since it offers to punish the enemy at little cost — also like Mr. Obama. But the problem is that even ‘carpet-bombing,’ in Mr. Cruz’s Curtis LeMay-ish phrase, won’t be enough to remove Islamic State from its territory, much less defeat it,” the board wrote this week.
“We need Sunni Arab allies on the ground, and those won’t arrive in enough numbers without a greater U.S. commitment to the fight,” they added, after praising Rubio’s strategy. “The interventionists are more honest, as a President … Cruz would discover on his first day in office.”
The board also said that Rubio was right to ding Cruz during the fifth GOP primary debate for voting “yes” this summer on the USA Freedom Act, which “barred the bulk collection of bulk telephone records.”
Rubio “rightly pointed out that” the NSA now can’t gather records and review them to track communications patterns, the board wrote. This change will make it easier for terrorists to pull off more mass shooting events like the one in San Bernardino, Calif., where 14 people were shot and killed by two radicalized jihadists, the Florida senator said during Tuesday’s debate.
“And the terrorist that attacked us in San Bernardino was an American citizen, born and raised in this country. And I bet you we wish we would have had access to five years of his records so we could see who he was working with,” Rubio added.
The Wall Street Journal then went on to accuse Cruz of not being “forthright” Tuesday evening when he was asked to defend his vote against bulk data collections.
“He justified his vote because he said it let the NSA focus on terrorists, not ‘millions of law-abiding citizens,'” the board wrote. “But the reason broad data collection is necessary is because sometimes we don’t know, as in San Bernardino, who might not be law-abiding.”
“Our guess is that Mr. Cruz realizes that the vote he cast to appeal to [Sen. Rand Paul’s] supporters has now become politically treacherous,” they added. “So he is trying to limit the damage by making his previous calculation sound like hawkish principle. This slipperiness has become part of his political method, and it is a character issue for a potential Commander in Chief as much as it is a substantive one.”
In a contest comparing the two Republican candidates on issues concerning national security matters, the Wall Street Journal has more often printed sharp rebukes of Cruz, although the newspaper has not avoided publishing criticisms of the Florida lawmaker either.
