None Dare Call It Treason: Tom Cotton, Iran and Old GOP Ideas
Two weeks before freshman Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and 46 Senate Republican co-signatories sent a Missed Connections letter to Iranian hardliners (“Saw you in Tehran . . . thought you might want to get together and sabotage nuclear arms control talks?”), sparking accusations of treason, I got to see Cotton in action at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I already knew him as a bad liar who still thinks Iraq was involved in 9/11, wants to prosecute New York Times reporters and fears the inevitable partnership betweenMexican drug cartels and ISIS, but homeboy can work a room.
CPAC is a bubble of conservative neuroses, improbably packed into a weekend at a Maryland resort called the Gaylord. American power abuts the certitude that everyone in America is going to die tomorrow. The triumphalism of the American Dream, indivisible from conservatism, is as axiomatic as the fact that America has been destroyed by homosocialists. Sitting next to noted death walrus John Bolton, Cotton fit right in.
The CPAC conference room was standing-room only, stuffy with faint sweat, hot worsted wool and heavy breathing for boilerplate comments you could have predicted before you crossed the threshold. Cotton – who looks appropriately like Anthony Perkins in Psycho – proudly likened America to Rome, an empire that slowly tore itself apart over for-profit foreign wars, external threats leveraged to drown out domestic discontent, revenue diverted from infrastructure. Listeners murmured approvingly. Cotton asserted the need to send America to war to “defend its national interests” against “trans-national terrorist groups.” By his utterly meaningless definitions, we need to fight anyone, and we need to do it anywhere, and it is our right. A thrill went through the audience.
It’s easy to think Cotton is stupid and easy to think he’s insane. His robotically repeating the words “Barack Obama” 74 times during a debate or claiming that signing up for Obamacare will get your identity stolen by Russian hackers feeds both theories in a way that seems too simple. Cotton knows his audience, and he knows that the Republican Party has purity tested itself so many times that an entire conference room of people refusing to leave until they could touch his hand bears more resemblance to the Republican voting bloc than not.
The New York Times editorial page called his conduct “disgraceful” – but despite embarrassingly cretinous excuses after the fact, sending a letter to Iran to undermine Obama’s P5+1 nuclear arms control talks actually wasn’t a bad move. Obstructing presidential foreign policy has a rich bipartisan history. Cotton’s short-term strategy works on the campaign trail and in accordance with the necessities of neoconservative foreign policy. And his interference represents little more than another enactment of the theory of government espoused by his party. To admit that everything he believes in is either completely idiotic or extremely dangerous doesn’t take away from the fact that Tom Cotton, grossly enough, has a point.
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Interfering in presidential foreign and military policy works.