Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is expected to join the crowded Republican presidential race, bashed Rand Paul Wednesday as unfit to be commander-in-chief, saying that Paul is “taking the weakest, most liberal Democrat position” on the Islamic State.
Paul, among the candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination, said on MSNBC's “Morning Joe” Wednesday that “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately. And most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS.”
“These hawks also wanted to bomb Assad, which would have made ISIS's job even easier,” Paul continued. “They created these people. ISIS is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved – they loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya.”
Paul was responding to criticism from hawkish Republican senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is also a potential presidential candidate, and John McCain of Arizona, who have argued that America’s failure to intervene in the Syrian civil war helped create the Islamic State.
Jindal responded to Paul’s comments with an official written statement from the Louisiana governor’s office, declaring that the Kentucky senator is “unsuited to be Commander- Chief.”
“It's one thing for Senator Paul to take an outlandish position as a Senator at Washington cocktail parties, but being Commander-in-Chief is an entirely different job,” Jindal said in the statement. “We should all be clear that evil and Radical Islam are at fault for the rise of ISIS, and people like President Obama and Hillary Clinton exacerbate it.”
Jindal, who has visited early primary voting states but finishes near the bottom in national polls of potential candidates, declared from the Louisiana governor’s office that “it has become impossible to imagine a President Paul defeating radical Islam and it's time for the rest of us to say it."
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