ONLY THE STRONG

By-the-numbers recitation of the Arkansas senator’s conservatives-good, liberals-bad reductions.

Though he writes briefly about his experiences in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s little specificity about what he did there. The author criticizes Joe Biden for completing a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that completed a deal set in place by his predecessor. Naturally, there’s no criticism of Trump to be found here. The man is evidently a superhero, and “the Trump administration treated our friends like friends and our foes like foes.” Meanwhile, whatever liberals do is bad, dating back decades. Consider the Vietnam anti-war movement, about which Cotton blusters, “Vietnam was the perfect opportunity for the New Left to act on its hatred of America. These cowards refused to fight, of course, but they did more than that. They condemned their brave fellow Americans who would fight, sided with the enemy, and unleashed violence across our country. Many pampered radicals avoided the war by dodging the draft.” That last part may be true, but so did the aforementioned Trump, to say nothing of Rush Limbaugh and (though he protests otherwise) Ted Nugent and a legion of other Cotton allies. There’s not much you haven’t already heard from the late Limbaugh in Cotton’s pages: Liberals want to see Communist China take over the world (unless it was John Kennedy, who was happy to cave in to the Russians instead); liberals lost the otherwise winnable war in Vietnam (“Democrats sacrificed victory, satisfied with merely looking tough in the short run”); leftist radicals wanted to bomb the Capitol during Vietnam, a matter that Cotton repeats numerous times while keeping mum about the actual radical attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; liberals are smug members of the elite class (though Cotton is a graduate of Harvard Law). It’s like listening to a tipsy uncle rant at the Thanksgiving table.

Red meat, well past its sell-by date, for the anti-Pelosi crowd.