Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney is no fan of the Iran nuclear deal being proposed by the Obama administration, but he thinks Texas Sen. Ted Cruz went too far when he said it amounts to the United States financing terrorists.
In an interview on Fox News in mid-July, Cruz said that "if this deal goes through, the Obama administration will become the leading financier of terrorism against America in the world," adding that he's "heard this referred to before as the 'Jihadist Stimulus Bill.'"
He has continued to make similar comments when talking about the proposal,
as Cruz did Tuesday during a roundtable discussion with other lawmakers when he said that the deal with Iran will lead to the release of "billions of dollars under control of this administration" to "flow into the hands of jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans, to murder Israelis, to murder Europeans."
But Romney said on his Twitter account on Thursday, that the comments by the Texas Republican "hurts the cause:"
Cruz responded to Romney's tweet during a radio interview Thursday with Chad Hasty on 790 AM KFYO in Lubbock, Texas,
Business Insider is reporting.
"So Mitt Romney's tweet today said, 'Gosh, this rhetoric is not helpful,'" Cruz told Hasty. "John Adams famously said, 'Facts are stubborn things.' Describing the actual facts is not using rhetoric; it is called speaking the truth."
The presidential hopeful then recalled Romney's debate with President Barack Obama in 2012 when they discussed the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
"Part of the reason that Mitt Romney got clobbered by Barack Obama is because we all remember that third debate where Barack Obama turned to Mitt and said, 'I said the Benghazi attack was terrorism and no one is more upset by Benghazi than I am.' And Mitt, I guess listening to his own advice, said, 'Well gosh, I don't want to use any rhetoric. So OK, never mind. I'll just kind of rearrange the pencil on the podium here," Cruz said.
"We need to stand up and speak the truth with a smile," the Texas Republican added. "The truth has power and every time we have Republicans who shy away — who don't want to engage, who don't want to speak the truth — we lose."