Our Boy Tom on stage
This evening might be kind of big for Our Boy Tom Cotton, except that I fear he may get lost amid all the fighting and kicking for the Lord and Donald Trump, not in that order.
Our surly and extremist junior senator appears possibly to be the most tame and moderate speaker in tonight’s circus-worthy lineup leading to the main man’s coronation address at the Trump Cult of Personality Extravaganza, formerly known as the Republican National Convention.
Cotton’s job and choice position on the program, for which the admiring Trump handpicked him, is to take his shot at advancing his presidential bid in 2024 by asserting for Trump’s interim convenience that Joe Biden has been wrong on every foreign policy issue of his time.
It’s an easy task. All Tom has to do is quote the Obama administration’s own defense secretary, Robert Gates.
It was Gates who wrote in his book that Joe was impossible not to like, but, for goodness sakes, voted against post-withdrawal aid for Vietnam, called the Shah’s removal from Iran a step forward, opposed Ronald Reagan’s military buildup that supposedly contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse, voted against the first Bush’s successful Iraq war and for the second Bush’s disastrous one, and advised Barack Obama not to go forward with the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
It happens. Biden is a five-decade conventional career politician whose foreign policy positions over that half-century reflect a deadly attempted finesse of partisanship and conventional establishment behavior. The Democrats have been wrongheaded a few times and the establishment has been out to lunch a few more, and Joe has managed to straddle all that blunder.
If you run for president after 47 years in national politics, then your long record will be an opponent’s mother lode.
It’s why most of our presidents come from governorships or casino bankruptcy.
Tom’s assignment is political T-ball. He ought to be able to scowl his way through a ground-rule double, at least.
It won’t make Trump any more sane or fit. But it’s more than fair as issues go in the current environment.
But get a load of the rest of tonight’s Murderer’s Row of stretchrun speakers:
■ Rudy Giuliani will be brought back from the far-away pasture into which he was put after operating as a one-man unofficial State Department working in Trump’s personal political interest to use shady associates to try to force Ukraine to smear Biden before it could get money the Congress had plainly voted to send it to help it resist Trump’s pal Putin.
■ Franklin Graham will be brought in to pray after Giuliani speaks, perhaps for forgiveness for that and to emphasize that he is not Jerry Falwell Jr.
Maybe his prayer will repeat his lamentation on Twitter that the Democrats didn’t include God in their convention. Actually, the Democrats offered several references to Biden’s lifelong Catholic faith. Alas, though, those references contained no vital citations from
“Two Corinthians.”
■ Mitch McConnell will be brought in because he has to be, considering he’s the majority leader of the branch of Congress that saved Trump from removal from office in regard to the aforementioned Giuliani’s cavorting in Ukraine.
■ House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will be brought because … uh … oh, yeah, because McConnell’s getting to speak.
■ Housing Secretary Ben Carson will say something. And he has certainly said some things over the years, such as that Fox News is the only thing that kept the United States from becoming Cuba.
■ A person called Dana White who has run up a reported net worth of a half-billion dollars with a mixed martial arts entertainment circuit—that’s where two fighters get in a cage and kick each other in the head and scrap and pound each other while they’re down—is listed as sharing duties with Ivanka Trump in presenting her father.
It turns out Trump was an early advocate of this wildly mixed form of brutality because it reminded him of his business and political style. Kicking a guy in the head and then pounding that head while the guy is down—that’s the Republican answer to all that sissy Democratic empathy.
It appears entirely possible from such a lineup that Cotton’s conventional if angry foreign-policy attack on Biden will get lost in the greater Trumpian celebration of evangelically religious head-kicking.
Amid such pageantry, Tom might need as his talent segment to do some jujitsu while performing a reading from One John or Two John or Three John.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.