ABC News Videos | ABC Entertainment News
Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) on Sunday upped his criticism of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), saying he doesn’t think the Kentucky Republican will be the GOP’s 2016 presidential nominee.
{mosads}Jindal, who last week said it’s impossible to imagine a President Paul defeating radical Islam, said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that he “wasn’t surprised to hear a presidential candidate want to continue the failed foreign policies of President Obama.”
“I was just surprised that it was a Republican. Listen to what [Paul] said. He said that ISIS exists because of foreign policy hawks in the Republican Party,” Jindal, who’s also considering a 2016 White House bid, added.
“George, that’s nonsense. ISIS is evil. ISIS exists because of radical Islam, radical Islam. It’s radical Islamic terrorism. Nobody in America is to blame for the existence of ISIS. That is reckless. That is almost bizarre rhetoric coming from somebody who’s auditioning to be commander in chief.”
Paul last week blasted members of his own party for sending arms to the Middle East that have ended up in the hands of Islamic militants.
Paul’s team then fired back after Jindal’s criticism, calling the governor a flip-flopper on Common Core who has cratered his state’s economy.
“We have cut our budget — we measure our success by the success of our people, not the success of government,” Jindal responded Sunday. “George, we’ve cut our budget 26 percent, over 30,000 fewer state government employees. Our economy has grown twice as fast as the national economy, three times as fast. Job creation, look, I think the senator is a little sensitive.”
“The reality is, we’ve already had a one-term senator from the Democratic Party who wanted to retreat from the war, that wanted to project American weakness. We don’t need to replace him with a one-term Republican senator that also wants to project that same weakness,” he added.
“We need peace through strength. All that weakness does is provoke our enemies. We’re not going to defeat evil through weakness. Unfortunately, Senator Paul doesn’t seem to understand that.”
Jindal said Sunday that the nation needs “a commander in chief who’s honest with us and tells us the real enemy that we face.”
“We’ve got a president who, for some reason, doesn’t want to even say the words radical Islamic terrorism.’ And we need to identify the enemy. We need to do everything we can to hunt them down and kill them. We need to take the political handcuffs off of our military advisers.”
Jindal dismissed President Obamas request for the use of military force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as “ridiculous.”
“Let’s not tell the enemy what we will or will not do. Let’s provide arms to the Kurds. Let’s show our allies in the region we’re serious about defeating this enemy,” he added.