Tom Cotton- a "bloodthirsty ghoul" with a Napoleon complex

A "law and order" Senator with a distressing taste for lawlessness when it serves his purpose

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has never identified as a reasonable, rational, or exceptionally peaceful personality. In fact,

Kevin M. Kruse

calls him, not inaccurately, “a bloodthirsty ghoul.”

Yeah, he’s…not to overstate the blindingly obvious…kind of a dick. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As a former Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, I suppose one could understand how Sen. Cotton might default to violent solutions for common problems. Having seen combat, you’d think he’d be one of the first to steer discussions away from violence.

I know people who’ve seen combat. They’re usually the first to suggest seeking peaceful solutions. They understand that war doesn’t determine who’s right or wrong, only who’s left (apologies to Bertrand Russell), and that the damage it leaves can last a lifetime.

Sen. Cotton's taste for blood (that of others, of course) has never left him, and he tends to forget his audience when he lets his true colors show.

During the summer of 2020, he famously used the op-ed pages of the New York Times to urge President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the U.S. military in our streets during the Black Lives Matter protests over the police murder of George Floyd. 

As hard as it is to escalate your stance from “let’s use the army against protesters,” Cotton has found a way, urging that ordinary citizens be allowed to “take matters into [their] own hands” and do whatever it takes to get rid of protesters blocking traffic. 

And given the fact that we have a recent example of a right-wing driver deciding to mow down left-wing protesters in his path, a decision that resulted in the death of one woman, it’s especially shocking.

The members of the law-and-order brigades, to whom Sen. Cotton proudly belongs, have a distressing tendency to slide into justifying lawlessness to support their version of “law and order.”

He has no problem with the idea of cracking skulls because other people are abstract concepts whose humanity is unworthy of consideration.

When others do it, it’s “rioting” and “chaos.” When the “law and order” folks do it, it’s “enforcing order and securing the peace.” Feel free to ignore the hypocrisy, y’all; it comes with self-righteousness and self-superiority.

You can do that when you lack the self-awareness to recognize your hypocrisy and asshole nature.

Perhaps it’s just a thinly veiled Napoleon complex. Or maybe he is just an asshole. Then again, it could be both. He’s never been renowned for his kindness or compassion, so I’m going to go with being an asshole. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

I’m going to guess he was denied his mother’s love, and now he’s taking it out on the world around him. Of course, I’m not a mental health professional, so I’m just spitballing. Whatever the truth may be, I think it comes around to Sen. Cotton being an unrepentant asshole who lacked a loving mother and perhaps even a caring father.

Or maybe it is as simple as being a case of a Napoleon complex.

Just about every time [we] mention Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, he’s having some kind of Little Man Syndrome episode. He’s just always gettin’ his dander up about somethin’ or another! Just angrily stirrin’ his sweet tea, his pencil neck fully erect so you know he’s serious! Shakin’ them tail feathers! “Well I never!” he screams as he angrily throws his body against the nearest fainting couch.

It’s kind of his thing.

“The United States may have to take matters into our own hands!” prissed Tom Cotton in 2019, about invading Mexico.

“No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” he tweeted in 2020 about protests after George Floyd’s murder, casually suggesting war crimes against American citizens, just after publishing a REAL big man (big man!) op-ed in the New York Times demanding Donald Trump “send in the troops.”

Back when President Barack Obama was negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, Cotton took it upon himself to write his OWN letter to Iran, saying “Nuh uh!” He added, “Scoff scoff scoff!” and “PEW PEW!” and “You just wait until your father gets home, gonna get a whippin’!” He’s always invading Iran, in his sex fantasies.

Remember that time he started sending cease-and-desist letters to his own (elderly lady who could have been your Nana) constituents, who were doing threatening behavior to him by calling his office like he was some kind of senator or something?

Sen. Tom Cotton is a pronounced authoritarian in a representative democracy, a decidedly awkward combination in normal times, but one that may prove perfect for the coming times if Donald Trump emerges victorious in November. Sen. Cotton would be a perfect fit in a new world authoritarian order, one where giving and following orders would be the coin of the realm.

As long as he’s the one giving the orders, of course.

In today’s world, he’s a man decidedly miscast- an awkward bully at best and an overbearing asshole at worst. As Kevin Kruse says,

I’m a bit of a broken record on this, but we can trace this line of conservative politics from Cotton and Trump back to the man who originated and popularized much of this approach, Governor George Wallace (D-AL) — right down to the threat to run over protesters.

During his 1968 campaign, when Wallace ran for president as an independent, a standard part of his stump speech was a riff about how some anti-war “anarchists” had laid down in front of President Lyndon Johnson’s limousine during a protest. Unlike LBJ, whom he accused of coddling law-breakers, Wallace promised he would not be passive in the face of a non-violent protest. “If one of these anarchists lies down in front of my limousine when I’m president,” he would then say, “it’ll be the last limousine he ever lies down in front of.” The crowds always ate it up.

But in truth, Wallace was all bluster. As newspapers reported in the fall of 1968, Wallace had already been confronted by a demonstrator lying down in front of his limousine, during his 1964 run as a Democrat. His driver was willing to run the man over, but Wallace was horrified at the thought: “Goodness, man, don’t do that!”

Of course, that’s the question when it comes to Tom Cotton. Is he a man of action or just a generic bully, a blustering man of many caustic words with no taste for following through on his threats? Does he like to sound harsh but fall short when it comes time for action?

Is he just an unreformed asshole and a bully? Or is something darker and more sinister at work within the Senator from Arkansas?

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

- Lyndon B. Johnson

One has to wonder about his humanity when he begins calling for the indiscriminate massacre of Palestinian civilians. Does Sen. Cotton consider Palestinians to be subhuman and unworthy of the protection of the international community? Does he believe that Israel has every right to bomb Gaza and its Palestinian residents off the map?

Of course, the majority of Palestinians are Christian, so what are their lives worth? And why should Americans care about them, anyway?

Perhaps because they’re human beings, and it would be the Christian thing to do?

His horrifying comments are not those of a man possessed of a shred of compassion or kindness. He comes off as what he may well be…a monster in an expensive suit.

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton called for the indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians on Sunday, during an interview with Shannon Bream on Fox News.

“As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza. Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas—Hamas killed women and children in Israel last weekend,” Cotton said. 

Over the past week, Israel has killed at least 2,800 people and injured nearly 10,000, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, in an onslaught of retaliatory strikes after the terrorist group Hamas made a deadly incursion into Israeli territory, killing 1,400 Israelis.  

Cotton did not bother to make a distinction between Hamas, the terrorist organization, and the millions of Palestinian civilians who are now facing a humanitarian crisis as Israel denies them food, water, and electricity. Instead, Cotton insisted that Hamas was to blame for the thousands of Palestinians suffering as a result of Israeli bombs. 

Cotton explicitly blamed Hamas for the Israeli military’s slaughter of Palestinian children, implying that the terrorist group was trying to force the hand of the United States by causing Israel to commit heinous war crimes. “If Hamas uses schools, and kindergartens, and mosques for military purposes, Israel has every right under the laws of war to strike back,” Cotton said. “It is Hamas that is committing war crimes by using those civilians to create the imagery to try to put pressure on the Biden administration,” he added.

Yes, Hamas’ tactics have been reprehensible, and they should be held to account, but they have not been the ones firing on schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. They’re not the ones slaughtering civilians by the hundreds and causing a humanitarian catastrophe on the ground. They’re not the ones killing children playing füsball in the streets.

That would be Israel.

War doesn’t determine who is right, only who is left.

- Bertrand Russell

Don’t get me wrong; I historically have been, and remain, very pro-Israel. The Jewish state has a right to exist and defend itself. In the wake of the October 7 attack, it had a right to respond. Still, no reasonable person could say that what is happening now is part of a proportionate response to October 7.

The moral and actual calculus doesn’t add up.

What Israel is engaged in now can only reasonably be called genocide against the Palestinian people, and Sen. Cotton is firmly behind that. It’s a monstrous position with no moral justification- unless you don’t consider Palestinians to be human.

While Democratic support for Palestinians has increased in the face of Israeli aggression, the Biden administration has not signaled much more than sympathy for the Palestinians, and continued to vocally back Israel. 

Cotton’s abhorrent call for violence ignores the fact that the Israeli military has previously engaged in disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians, in blatant violation of international law. Most crucially, international law obligations are nonreciprocal, meaning that if one side commits war crimes, that doesn’t mean the other can, according to Sari Bashi, the program director at Human Rights Watch. 

More than anything, Cotton’s calls for indiscriminate violence do nothing to wind down a conflict that has already cost thousands of innocent lives and that threatens to expand into a devastating regional war. 

Sen. Tom Cotton is an egregious symbol of what’s wrong with today’s Republican Party. Combine a lack of empathy with an absence of humanity, compassion, kindness, and consideration for the lives and validity of experiences of others, and what you have is today’s GOP. It’s a party that doesn’t give a damn about those who aren’t good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Patriotic Americans.

(Kill ‘em all. Let God sort ‘em out, eh?)

All others need not apply because those who don’t meet that definition are “less than” and unworthy of the consideration extended to good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Patriotic Americans.

This world-class inhumanity is why Sen. Cotton is so dismissive of Palestinians. To him, they’re the same as those who were on the business end of his rifle sights in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re enemies one must exterminate, threats in a dog-eat-dog, you-or-me world. You make the other, poor, dumb son-of-a-bitch die for their religion and ideology before he makes you die for yours (apologies to Gen. George S. Patton)

When you come right down to it, what Sen. Cotton feels put on this Earth to do is defend the interests of good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Patriotic Americans.

Because nothing and no one else matters.

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