There's a new feelgood summer movie just released: Cotton Comes To Denmark.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Summer Concepcion points us to this account from talkbusiness.net in which Senator Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapdick from Arkansas, takes credit for being the first to raise the looney-tunes notion of buying Greenland from Denmark.

Speaking Wednesday (Aug. 21) at the inaugural Talk Business & Politics Power Lunch at the Red & Blue Events Center in Little Rock, Arkansas’ junior senator said buying Greenland is a no-brainer.

(Ed Note: I'll say. Please continue.)

"Obviously, the right decision for this country,” Cotton said quickly when asked by Talk Business & Politics CEO Roby Brock about Trump’s Greenland tweets. “You’re joking, but I can reveal to you that several months ago, I met with the Danish ambassador and I proposed that they sell Greenland to us.”... Cotton said Greenland’s mineral reserves and its strategic location make it an ideal strategy move for the U.S., noting that such reasons are why President Harry Truman offered $100 million in the 1940s. Cotton told the Red & Blue crowd that Greenland’s “economic potential is untold,” and the island is “vital to our national security.” “Anyone who can’t see that is blinded by Trump derangement,” he said. Cotton said in 2018 the Chinese government sought to essentially bribe the local government of Greenland into allowing it to build three military bases there. But efforts by Trump administration and some in Congress convinced Denmark to weigh in at the last minute and block the deal, Cotton said. “I told the president you should buy it as well,” Cotton said, adding later that “He’s (Trump) heard that from me and from some other people as well.”

You will note that Cotton sees Greenland merely as a place to pillage on behalf of his donor class, and as a piece on the MadLibs Risk board that exists in his head. That there are actual people living there who might not want the pleasure of living under our current political bedlam does not enter into the calculations of the galaxy-brained world thinker proposing it. Self-determination isn't for the lower orders, who don't cash checks from the extraction industries.

Tom Cotton is a genuinely dangerous presence in our politics today. He is just as much of a megalomaniac as the president* is, and is a hundred IQ points smarter. He shares with El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago a contempt for constitutional order and political norms. There is about him a kind of messianic glow focused toward re-establishing the American empire. He needs to be watched, carefully, because he's positioning himself perfectly to pick up Trumpism without being Trump.

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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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