Honest. If you’d told me a while back there’d be a “Senator Cotton,” I’d have laughed and pointed out that we’ve been dealing with those cotton-brained senators ever since Reconstruction. So the idea of a cotton Senator (or a “Senator Cotton”) is kind of an old story.
But now there’s Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He’s for real; he’s (bottom line) anti-government; and his ambitions have been wonderfully dissected by Jeb Lund at Rolling Stone.
A sample:
The New York Times editorial page called his conduct “disgraceful” – but despite embarrassingly cretinous excuses after the fact, sending a letter to Iran to undermine Obama’s P5+1 nuclear arms control talks actually wasn’t a bad move. Obstructing presidential foreign policy has a rich bipartisan history. Cotton’s short-term strategy works on the campaign trail and in accordance with the necessities of neoconservative foreign policy. And his interference represents little more than another enactment of the theory of government espoused by his party. To admit that everything he believes in is either completely idiotic or extremely dangerous doesn’t take away from the fact that Tom Cotton, grossly enough, has a point.
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Interfering in presidential foreign and military policy works. …Lund,RollingStone
Nothing new in being against gubment or the darkie in the White House. Nothing new, either in allowing your strings to be pulled by the defense industry.
On Tuesday, the day after his letter to Hezbollah’s masters became public, Cotton provided a clue about his motives: He’d had a breakfast date with the National Defense Industrial Association — a trade group for Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and the like.
You’re not allowed to know what Cotton said to the defense contractors. The event was “off the record and strictly non-attribution.” But you can bet it was what Dwight Eisenhower meant when he warned of the military-industrial complex.
The defense industry contributed more than $25 million in the 2014 election cycle and spent more than $250 million lobbying over that time period, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. For the defense industry, this is a good investment: If Senate Republicans blow up nuclear talks, it makes war with Iran that much more likely — and nobody would benefit as much from that war as military contractors. ...Milbank,WaPo
In the end, having all this animus towards “King” Obama and government in general while hugging an ongoing policy of shock and awe is exactly what the the rightiest right at CPAC wants — what the extreme elements of the Republican party have advocated for well over a century. That, and embracing the corruption of elections.
The American Republic has always been a fundamentally screwheaded experiment in the perversion of democracy, empowering property as much as people, while aggregating people in distorted non-representative territories to diminish their leverage on power. And that’s just in one branch of government. At the same time, it structured the two active branches – the legislature and executive – to be mutual antagonists, glossing such an instantly sclerotic system as a check against tyranny when a look at the early conditions for the franchise reveal a much more profound check against any momentum from great mass of human beings within its domain. Tom Cotton likes that just fine. Anything like the smooth, responsive performance of a parliamentary democracy is anathematized by Cotton and his ilk because it is theoretically possible for them to, at some point, lose power. …Lund,RollingStone