title:  Ted Cruz Holds Hearing On Why Obama Won’t Use The Words He Likes
text: Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, is holding a hearing on radical Islam. This isn t just any hearing on radical Islam, though. It s specifically investigating why President Obama won t use the term  radical Islamic terrorism  when he s talking about radical Islamic terrorism.Seriously.Ted Cruz, a United States Senator, is using Congressional resources, and taking up Congressional time, to investigate words.We wish we were making this up.The hearing s goal is to amp up his message that Obama s refusal to use those specific words has weakened our national security, and the primary accusation is that Obama has been scrubbing the words  radical Islamic terrorism  from public records in order  to pretend the threat doesn t exist. There is a metric ton of right-wing news sites and blogs that pushed a conspiracy theory that Obama censored references to radical Islam from a video of a meeting with French President Francois Hollande, just after the Paris attacks last year. It turns out there was a technical glitch with the recording equipment that dropped the audio at that point in the meeting. As soon as the White House became aware of the problem, they published an updated video with complete audio.Ted Cruz, being the unintelligent, irrational individual we know him to be, would rather waste his subcommittee s time and taxpayer dollars on vapid conspiracy nonsense if it means taking Obama down. The truth is that Obama won t use those specific words because he s trying to isolate ISIS, and terrorists, from the broader Islamic world. He s said: [W]e are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam. That is the cold, naked truth that the cowering right won t accept. George W. Bush said the same thing many times throughout his presidency. Here s one example from 2002, not too long after Sept. 11: This great nation of many religions understands, our war is not against Islam, or against faith practiced by the Muslim people. Our war is a war against evil.  [emphasis mine]Ted Cruz, whose brain is the size of a peanut, won t acknowledge that though, because reasons. Others, however, will try to force him to acknowledge it. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) did that, saying at the hearing: I have plenty of disagreements with President George W. Bush, but I still marvel that after all we went through [he still pushed us to distinguish between the vast majority of Muslims and a few dangerous extremists]. There s a serious problem when a Democrat can make George W. Bush actually look like a good president. These usurpers of American patriotism not only excel at ignoring pesky things like that, but they also excel at just plain looking foolish. Cruz even had a witness there that went so far as to accuse Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Andre Carson (D-IN) of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, simply because they attended a Muslim event once. Ellison and Carson are the only two Muslims serving in Congress.What can we expect from the man who appointed noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, of all people, to his presidential campaign team as a national security adviser, though? Gaffney thinks that Grover Norquist is a secret Muslim; it s hard to take anything he says or does any more seriously than we take the word vomit that spews forth from Donald Trump s mouth.Bottom line: Cruz is pursuing a vendetta of some type against Obama. Either that, or he s desperate to cement his legacy as one of the best Senators we ve ever seen before Obama leaves office. He s only cementing his legacy as an out-of-control loon who complains about big government and wasted money, but has no problem using the government and wasting money to pursue fluff.Featured image by Win McNamee/Getty Images