U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton ventured recently on a small national-television interview tour ostensibly to tout some sort of book that has come out under his byline.
I have not read the book because life is too short.
Such a book is a pro forma prerequisite for a presidential prospect, as Cotton seems to be in this age of Donald Trump that proves anybody can be president.
In three rat-a-tat national television broadcasts, Cotton consistently made no sense.
First, as dispensed with in appropriately perfunctory fashion in this space last week, Cotton endeavored to explain to CBS This Morning that his preposterous president's tariffs were made less a sacrifice for farmers and consumers by the context of the sacrifice of persons who give their lives in military combat in service to the country.
One had nothing to do with the other. An homage to those who give their lives for the country is, while nice, not a substantive economic argument.
It's Tommy One-Note, is what it is.
Tommy One-Note tries to couch everything in the issue of military service, usually his own, except, you know, in regard to the fortunate-son president to whom he has lent his soul and who got a Vietnam-era deferment because he had an alleged boo-boo on his foot.
Then Tommy One-Note went on Firing Line, and, when asked if the United States could handle Iran in war, grinned in the fashion of an apprentice Wild West cowboy and said, sure, by "first strike, last strike."
What he meant, it was later explained, was that if Iran made the first strike, the Yanks would finish it.
That's a revision of "shock and awe," which, as we know, tamed Iraq in a matter of hours and cast a permanent calm over the entire Mideast, marginalizing the region's fundamentalists and putting its terrorists out of business.
You remember that, surely. The mission was accomplished apace. A president less preposterous than the current one rode a military plane onto an aircraft carrier to strut and tell us so.
Then, on Sunday, Cotton went on Meet the Press on NBC and got tangled up on the abortion issue now made trickier by Alabama for right-wingers such as himself.
That college football factory masquerading as a society has made the anti-abortion movement so extreme that a woman can't even get any consideration for being raped.
Searching creatively for the simplistic bogeyman that right-wing rhetoric requires, Cotton told Chuck Todd that the problem with the abortion issue is all these "unelected judges" constraining our options on a moral issue driven by scientific advancement.
These "unelected judges" keep making all these danged court rulings when, in fact, our elected representatives such as himself could solve the issue--appropriately and democratically, you see--by finding a middle ground if the courts would stay the heck out of it.
Or so Cotton held forth.
Such nonsense had not been heard in American politics since the president with the boo-boo on his foot last made a post on Twitter.
Cotton was saying that an abortion solution would require only two branches of government, a preposterous president and a soul-mortgaged Congress. He was saying the third branch, the judiciary, ought to close its clerks' offices to anyone wanting to file a lawsuit on the legality of any abortion law.
Unelected judges? My heavens, the whole point of the right-wing political movement has been to install Republicans in the White House and the Senate to implant unelected judges such as beer-keg connoisseur Brett Kavanaugh who would do away with abortion-choice rights for women.
The entire right-wing movement that produced a president such as Trump and a senator such as Cotton was predicated on a second-place president's nominating anti-abortion judges who would be confirmed by a Senate controlled by Republicans though, cumulatively, the Republican members had won fewer votes than the Democrats.
Yet anyone playing a drinking game based on Cotton's saying "unelected judges" on Meet the Press on Sunday would have wound up as blitzed as a Supreme Court justice in prep school.
Anyway, how do elected judges pan out? I direct your attention to the Arkansas Supreme Court, currently atwitter in the judicial temperament of salary greed.
And another thing: How has Congress been doing lately on finding common ground on socially divisive issues to produce sound democratic solutions?
That's another mission accomplished, I suppose.
Cotton's idea of common ground is something between the view that life begins at conception and the competing view that life begins ... also at conception.
But his real solution seems to be for any state to do whatever it wants on the issue, which has him essentially endorsing wildly permissive abortion laws in New York and Virginia along with an unfathomably restrictive one in Alabama.
Alas, I suspect Tommy One-Note's performance on Meet the Press on abortion was hampered by his inability to work into his answer that he was in the Army.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/23/2019