By David Shuster
One of the saddest jokes of our time is that Arkansas, a state once primarily known for rice, Wal-Mart founders, and the Clintons, has now given our nation a U.S. Senator whose chief distinction is an instinct for the most primitive idea in any room. I am talking, of course, about Republican Tom Cotton. He recently lectured the American people on the virtues of blowing hapless men to kingdom come.
This week, in a classified U.S. military briefing, Cotton joined other Senate and House lawmakers in viewing videos of the September 2nd attacks on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat.
The Pentagon’s first strike killed 9 people on board and capsized the vessel. Two more men, injured and flailing, somehow survived that first strike and clung to the burning hull. The men apparently then had the temerity to try and right the vessel, perhaps because most human beings have an attachment to living. This, in the eyes of Senator Cotton, constituted grounds for their prompt re-atomization.
The U.S. military fired three more missiles, ensuring that the boat’s occupants would not inconvenience the Trump administration any further.
Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) the ranking democrat on the House intelligence committee, emerged from the classified briefing and told reporters the “double tap” video was “one of the most troubling things I’ve ever seen in my public life. You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel who were killed by the United States.” Himes noted that Pentagon policy and Geneva convention laws forbid the killing of such shipwrecked survivors.
Senator Cotton then strode out of the classified briefing and said the initial boat attack survivors deserved the additional ordnance that shredded them. Why? Because the men had been trying to “flip the boat back over.” The sheer audacity. The will to live! Cotton sees this as proof they intended to “stay in the fight,” as though the pair were elite commandos assembling a counter assault on the U.S. homeland. Never mind that they were trying to flip over a burning hull more than 1,500 miles away.
Still, listening to Cotton, one envisions the U.S. public trembling at the prospects of a splintered speed boat, soggy contraband, and two men coughing up seawater.
When reporters asked Cotton whether the survivors posed any actual danger, the GOP Senator snapped like a rabid terrier woken up from a nap. “Congressman Himes,” he declared, “may be okay with drug boats running to America. I just disagree with that.”
This is Tom Cotton’s method: reduce every question, no matter how subtle, to the intellectual level of a sloppy bar room brawl between slovenly and mentally challenged drunks. Why address the troubling ethics and illegalities of bombing drowning men when you can instead accuse your critics of siding with the enemy?
Even the U.S. military leaders who briefed Congress sheepishly acknowledged the boat carried no missiles, no explosives, and no plausible path toward any U.S. shore.
But because the survivors might have been reaching for radios to possibly try and contact other alleged drug smugglers, Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon went full annihilation. According to multiple news reports that have not been disputed, the two men were “blown apart in the water.”
Cotton’s response? He “didn’t see anything disturbing about it.” Of course he didn’t. A conscience is required for disturbance.
What Cotton calls courage is what civilized beings call bloodlust. In Cotton’s eternal war against shadows, mirages, and whatever phantoms his staff can scribble onto a briefing note, the GOP Senator finds renewal. One suspects that if Cotton, who served in the U.S. Army decades ago, were to now encounter an actual threat, —a real, breathing, formidable foe—he would faint from the excitement.
In the disgusting world of Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and their Congressional sycophants including Tom Cotton, compassion is a weakness, proportionality is a foreign language, and human life is a negligible detail.
Some day when a future archaeologist digs up the remains of this once respected Republic, he or she will undoubtedly find among the ruins a MAGA plaque, signed by Trump and Hegseth, honoring Tom Cotton for his gallant stand against a capsized and burned speedboat.
History will also record that Cotton and the other deranged Trumpian psychopaths caused more harm to America than any drug boat ever could.
