Here in the shebeen, we’ve been keeping a weather eye on the career of Senator Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapdick from Arkansas. He first came to our attention in 2014, when he was running for the Senate. He spent the entire campaign ducking, and dodging, and hiding from the fact that, while he was in the House, because he was a carefully cultivated creature of the Tea Party, he voted against a farm bill that would’ve helped a number of people back home. Stuck for an answer, Cotton went back to the basics. Greg Sargent at The Washington Post caught him.

Cotton was the only House Republican from Arkansas to vote against the farm bill, and Senator Mark Pryor continues to hammer him over it in ads and elsewhere. Cotton is running his own spot in response that claims he voted against the farm bill because Obama “hijacked” it and “turned it into a food stamp bill.” Cotton adds: “Career politicians love attaching bad ideas to good ones.” The ad’s claim about Obama is ridiculous: Food stamp spending has been in farm bills for decades. But as a window into Cotton’s particular brand of Tea Party economics, the more interesting claim in the ad is the suggestion that food stamp spending is a “bad idea,” while the farm bill piece itself is a “good one”… The “bad idea” Cotton alludes to in the ad was the spending on food for poor people. The food-stamp-only bill that Cotton voted for sliced spending on food stamps…Cotton has explicitly said spending on food stamps should be cut because recipients are doing just fine and don’t need the help, claiming: “They have steak in their basket, and they have a brand-new iPhone, and they have a brand-new SUV.”

He got elected because, well, Arkansas. Once in the Senate, Cotton immediately began positioning himself as a young intellectual lion. Watch him on the stump sometime. He fairly glows with self-righteous certitude. You never will see a person so thoroughly sure of himself.

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And why not? He’s spent his entire career being groomed by the plutocrats who make our politicians these days. The Koch Brothers threw Cotton a dinner to honor his “courage” in screwing his constituents. He’s a perfect product of that world: a Harvard-educated veteran of the Iraq War who also can hit all the old by-cracky notes about his plucky folks back home. He’s had so much sunshine blown up his ass by the various oligarchs and chickenhawks who finance Republican campaigns that it’s a wonder Cotton doesn’t photosynthesize right there on national television.

Cotton first hit the big time in 2015 when, in his first year in the Senate, he organized 47 senators to send a letter to the government of Iran while the Obama Administration was in the process of negotiating the nuclear deal with that country. With the kind of glistening presumption that adorns his every public utterance, Cotton made sure that the Iranians knew that he was doing this for their own good, lest they stumble over the United States Constitution.

“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system…The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen, and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

Essentially, Cotton went out of his way to sabotage the diplomacy being conducted by the duly elected president of the United States, and he did it by condescending to the leadership of an adversarial nation. The Iranians found this rather amusing but, my god, who is this guy when he’s at home? But nothing about Cotton’s Koch-kissed career says more about the man himself than the fact that he held up the ambassadorial appointment of a dying woman to “inflict pain” on President Barack Obama.

So the fact that, over the weekend, Cotton spent so much time calling a fellow senator, Richard Durbin, a liar, and that Cotton did that to fly cover for the president*’s racist outburst at a meeting on immigration, should surprise absolutely nobody. Neither should the fact that the White House already has clowned Cotton on this clumsy lie with an even clumsier explanation. From The Washington Post:

Three White House officials said Perdue and Cotton told the White House that they heard “shithouse” rather than “shithole,” allowing them to deny the president’s comments on television over the weekend. The two men initially said publicly that they could not recall what the president said.

Tom Cotton deserves a president* like the president*. The two of them share an instinct for vicious, self-serving political utilitarianism, an overweening ambition far beyond their actual talents, and a casual disinterest in the truth if it conflicts with expedience. The country doesn’t deserve a president like Tom Cotton.

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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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