Here at the shebeen, we long ago determined that we were going to keep an eye on Senator Tom Cotton, the bobble-necked loon from Arkansas and semi-official pen-pal of the mullahs in Iran. I believe that he believes that, if He, Trump craters the Republican brand in November, the party will turn its lonely eyes toward him as the True Conservative who can lead it away from the smoking pile of rubble in the desert.

Previously, Cotton largely has appeared on our radar as having gone Full Wolfowitz on foreign policy. He really is the Great Neocon Hope. On Thursday, though, as The Hill informs us, he began to unfold his domestic priorities—namely, keeping America's prisons full to bursting.

Take a look at the facts. First, the claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: For the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted and jailed. Law enforcement is able to arrest or identify a likely perpetrator for only 19 percent of property crimes and 47 percent of violent crimes. If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem."

This seems to me to be something of a law enforcement problem; it doesn't seem to have anything to do with how many people already are in jail. The problem with our overcrowded—and dangerous—prison systems is that they aren't crowded enough. Cotton has been bughouse on this issue for a while now; in January, as Tiger Beat On The Potomac told us at the time, Cotton worked hard to torpedo that rarest of all birds—an actual bipartisan effort to solve an actual problem. This drew the ire and astonishment of noted civil libertarian John Cornyn of Texas.

Backers of the bill say their changes to sentencing laws merely allow qualifying inmates to have their cases revisited by the same judge and prosecutor who landed them in prison. The judge would then have the discretion to hand down a reduced sentence. "It's not true," said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) of opponents' insistence that violent criminals could be freed under the sentencing reforms. "I'd say, please read the bill and listen to people like [former Attorney General] Michael Mukasey, who makes the point, which is a critical point, that there's no get-out-of-jail-free card."

Doesn't matter to Cotton that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, or that underpaid public employees have to manage things in overcrowded prisons. The only thing that matters is that he was in Baghdad, and you weren't, and he's thus qualified to speak on criminal justice reform in the United States because Support The Troops, or something.

"I saw this in Baghdad. We've seen it again in Afghanistan," recalled Cotton, who served in the Army during both wars. "Security has to come first, whether you're in a war zone or whether you're in the United States of America."

Yeah, you start turning loose all those people convicted of weed-related offenses and the next thing you know, they're planting IED's all over Colorado.

By 2020, I figure he'll be running around Iowa in body armor and flexing in every cornfield to the mystification of the populace.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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