Krauthammer Wants to Know: Where is Ted Cruz Now?

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer Thursday continued to demand answers from both Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and his "sidekick," Utah Sen. Mike Lee, about how they plan to proceed with their effort to abolish Obamacare.

"Where is he now? ... Where are the generals? What is their strategy to get the abolition of Obamacare?" Krauthammer said of the two Republicans on "The Laura Ingraham Show."

Krauthammer has attacked Cruz on his strategy of tying Obamacare to a temporary spending measure to keep the government operational. On the Ingraham show he included Lee in his criticism, saying the two have gone home "to have lunch," reports Politico.

"I mean his sidekick, Sen. Lee said, 'Oh, we're past Obamacare. We moved on,'" said Krauthammer. "These are the generals who lead people into the Battle of [the] Little Bighorn and then go home and have lunch and leave the troops out there? Where are they? Where are the generals? What's their strategy to get abolition of Obamacare?"

The columnist told Ingraham that while he has been arguing since 2009 that Obamacare should be repealed, Cruz didn't lay out a strategy with an end game before making his push against the president's health plan.

"I argued [to repeal Obamacare] in '09 and '10 ... I argued it every week in my writing, on television ... all of us were in the trenches. Cruz arrives on the scene and pretends he's just begun the fight against Obamacare," Krauthammer said, adding that Cruz never had a real plan to begin with even after Lee and others took up his cause.

He went on to deride Cruz and Lee as "the kamikaze brigade" and "the suicide caucus" for helping to lead Republicans into a party-damaging government shutdown.

Still, Krauthammer insisted that Republicans are "not in retreat" over Obamacare, despite reports to the contrary.

But he said, "There never was a way to abolish Obamacare now ... I'm all for charging the barricades, but you've got to show me how to penetrate them."

For Cruz's part, he insisted on Wednesday in a closed-door luncheon with conservative senators that his own polling information shows that the Republican Party's standing with the public has been bolstered by his call for defunding Obamacare.

Cruz also turned aside criticism from many in the party that his efforts to kill Obamacare have hurt the Republican brand.

"Not remotely," Cruz said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," adding that he thinks "far too many people are worried about politics."

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