The Kingmakers
by digby
Paul Waldman speculates that some GOP Senators might be feeling a little bit queasy about signing that letter. But he notes, correctly in my opinion, that while normal poltiicains might worry about being the instruments of destroying a nuclear agreement that might prevent WWIII, this has catapulted freshman Senator Tom Cotton into the political stratosphere:
All told, it looks like quite the fiasco. But Tom Cotton himself is probably saying, “That worked out great!”
That’s partly because the name “Tom Cotton” is now on so many lips, and he surely has more requests for television interviews than he could ever wish for. More than that, he’s shown what even a Senator who’s been in office just a few months can accomplish with a little initiative and creativity. It may be a black eye for his party, but to the tea party base from which Cotton sprang, he’s now a hero. The more criticism he gets, the more convinced they become of his heroism.
Indeed, a legislator in his home state of Arkansas has just introduced a bill that would allow Cotton to run for both re-election to his Senate seat and for president in 2020.
On paper, Cotton looks like a dream politician with nowhere to go but up — Iraq veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, the youngest senator at 37. It’s only when you listen to him talk and hear what he believes that you come to realize he’s a complete crackpot. During the 2014 campaign he told voters that the Islamic State was working with Mexican drug cartels and would soon be coming to attack Arkansas. When he was still in the Army he wrote a letter to the New York Times saying that its editors should be “behind bars” because the paper published stories on the Bush administration’s program to disrupt terrorist groups’ finances (which George W. Bush himself had bragged about, but that’s another story).
Read on …You won’t believe how nutty he really is.
But one thing Waldman doesn’t mention is the fact that Tom Cotton is a creation of the conservative blogosphere. That letter he wrote to the NY Times when he was still in the service was never published. He sent it to Powerline, Time magazine’s “Blog of the year”, and it went viral in the wingnut fever swamps. They are surely very proud.