The Man with the Brain of Cotton strikes again, proving again that there's no stupid like brain-dead right-wing stupid

"On the Ground"? Why, maybe it's because he's so darned tall, but it often seems as if the Man with the Brain of Cotton's feet don't reach to the ground.

by Ken

We already have a burgeoning tradition of right-wing "intellectuals" like Louisiana Gov. Booby Jindall and Wisconson Rep. Pauly-Pauly-Pauly Ryan, whose only imaginable intellectual credentials consist of blithering endlessly about policy matters that normal right-wingers never talk about, because they don't care about them except when they come gift-wrapped in brain-dead right-wing platitudes.

Now the hero of the Right-Wing Zero Functional Intelligence movement is Arkansas's freshman U.S. senator, Tom Cotton. One might think that his patina of Harvard education, not to mention his service as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, would mean that he knows something about the Middle East and possibly foreign policy, but he continues to demonstrate that he knows nothing about, well, apparently about anything.

It's going to be hard to top the blithering ignorance and imbecility with which the Man with the Brain of Cotton introduced himself to the world at large, in his famous letter to Iranian leaders purporting to teach them a thing or two about American democracy, when the only thing he knows about American democracy is that it's possible for a pathetic creature like him to be elected as one of 100 U.S. senators.

I'm not going to say that our boy Cottonbrain has topped the Letter to Iran, but it's not for want of trying.

As DailyKos's Laura Clawson writes of Senator Cottonbrain (in "Tom Cotton: Put Iraq out of your mind. Bombing Iran would take just 'several days'"): "Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton: losing his grip on reality, or lying shamelessly?"

It's not clear which conclusion would be more unflattering to Cotton in light of his claim that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities would be just like when then-President Bill Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in the late 1990s. It's just silly to think about the Iraq War of the 2000s, according to Cotton—silly, or a lie pushed by President Obama—"the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq and that’s simply not the case." Simply not the case!

“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”

Well, no, Senator Cottonbrain. This is a disadvantage of mouthing off about Iran when you don't actually know anything about Iran, starting with the considerable imperviousness to bombing with which its nuclear facilities have generally been constructed, and proceeding to a geopolitical situation that has very little to do with Sadaam Hussein's Iraq.

Such construction, of course, is often taken as proof of Iranian nefariousness. I think rather of a point that Ian Welsh made in a post yesterday, "Iranian Concerns About the Nuclear Deal Are Reasonable," about the fate of countries trying to resist First World control which give up weapons programs:

The West has been picking off, or attempting to pick off, states in order to isolate them, from Libya and Iraq to the Ukraine, with massive pressure on Venezuela. . . .

Libya gave up its weapon program. Iraq had no weapons program. Giving up your weapons program (ie, giving up your sprint capacity) is really dangerous. As commenter MFI noted, Qaddafi wound up getting sodomized by a knife because he made a deal with the West to give up his program.

The sanctions are absolutely crippling and I understand why many Iranians are absolutely desperate to make a deal. But some deterrent must be maintained. If it isn’t, well, the record of what happens to such countries is simply not good.  This is one reason why Khamenei is leery -- he knows his neck is on the line, and his death could be very unpleasant.

Laura Clawson in her post harks back to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's 2003 prediction about a war with Iraq ("It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months") and writes:

If the war in Iraq had ended after the six months that Rumsfeld thought was so unlikely, maybe Cotton could fool Americans into thinking that bombing Iran now wouldn't have broader implications. But we know how Iraq went, and it'll probably be at least a few more years before voters are ready to once again be sold the idea that war in the Middle East will be a breeze.

Which is all utterly true, but only begins to suggest the dimension of Senator Cottonbrain's cluelessness about Iran. I'm not aware of anyone actually familiar with the Iranian nuclear program who believes it could be even be seriously damanged by less-than-nuclear bombardment. I shudder to think what Senator Cottonbrain has to say about the prospect of nuclear war.

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