Ted Cruz: I Won Those Purple Hearts!

[Octafish]

The senator claims on the campaign trail that he was the reason the Fort Hood soldiers shot in a 2009 attack were awarded Purple Hearts. Why that’s stretching the truth just a tad.

Patricia Murphy
The Daily Beast, May 15, 2015

Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential stump speech electrifies conservative crowds with a cocktail of growls, whispers, warnings of impending doom, and at least one claim of personal accomplishment so powerful, it often brings many in the audience to their feet.

“Just a few weeks ago, I was down in Fort Hood, where the soldiers who were shot by Nidal Hasan were finally, finally, finally awarded the Purple Heart,” Cruz told activists last weekend at the conservative Freedom Forum in Greenville, S.C. “I’ll tell you the reason those Purple Hearts were awarded. I was very proud last year to introduce legislation in the Senate to mandate that the Pentagon award those Purple Hearts.”

Cruz rightly pointed out that for years, the Obama administration had classified the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, by Army Major Nidal Hasan as a “workplace violence” incident rather than as a terrorist attack, though Hasan’s rampage came after he had been in contact with al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. Hasan’s shooting spree left 13 dead and 32 wounded, including dozens of military personnel who were deemed ineligible for the Purple Heart because of the Pentagon’s classification of the attack as not combat-related.

At the end of 2014, Congress passed a bill requiring the Pentagon to reclassify the 2009 attack, and the Fort Hood victims were indeed awarded the Purple Heart.

But Cruz voted not once but twice against the Pentagon authorization bill that changed the Purple Heart policy. A Cruz spokesman told the Dallas Morning News that Cruz voted against the bill over an issue unrelated to the Fort Hood shootings but that “he would have found another way to get it done” had the bill had not passed. “Supporting one amendment certainly does not mean a senator is obligated to support the entire bill.”

And although Cruz played an important role on the Senate Armed Services Committee at last year, the credit for changing the Pentagon’s long-standing policy belongs to at least a dozen senators and members of Congress who had pushed the issue relentlessly for years before Cruz ever arrived in the Senate.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/15/ted-cruz-ask-me-for-a-purple-heart.html

[malthaussen]

1. Oh, be fair. The GOP deserves credit for a lot of Purple Hearts.

After all, they're the ones who started the wars to begin with.

-- Mal

[pinboy3niner]

3. And Purple Heart bandaids

[malthaussen]

6. Why do I want to dislocate her jaw?

-- Mal

[Octafish]

4. That is the point of it all.

Who gets paid.

[Buzz Clik]

2. Nice.

He's an idiot and a liar.

Next!

[Octafish]

5. Turd Ted really doesn't deserve the attention.

Using the dead and wounded from wars based on lies to promote his own brand of hypocrisy shows exactly what kind of idiot and liar he is.