Even dressed up, it’s still crass

If you like Nate Bell, surely you also like Tom Cotton. Both see terrorist attacks on American soil as political opportunities.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

Cotton offers a better personal resume, which he wears as a tasteful veneer.

Underneath, though, he befouls the U.S. House of Representatives with a Nate Bell tweet dressed up as a serious floor speech.

PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website that devotes itself to studied analysis of the accuracy of political rhetoric, delved deeply the other day into Cotton’s speech. It concluded the Cotton rhetoric was “mostly false.”

PolitiFact found fault in some of the details, a couple of the side-spins and the shamefully exploitative general premise that George W. Bush saved us fully from terrorist attacks at home but that Barack Obama hadn’t.

———

Cotton’s declarations were not significantly different in underlying substance or purpose-or crassness-from Bell’s tweeting that liberal Bostonians were cowering without semiautomatic weapons while a terrorist roamed the backyards of a residential neighborhood.

The young congressman of a Harvard education and military service in Iraq and Afghanistan brayed that Bush didn’t let any terrorists get through to American soil, but that Obama had waved in five.

Yes, Cotton scored terrorism by political party. Yes, he made that score 5-to-zero in favor of the Republicans.

He got positively animated about it, using his fingers to form a big fat “zero” to represent the terrorists’ attempts that managed to “reach their target” in America under Bush.

That’s except, Cotton stipulated, for Sept. 11, 2001, when a few terrorists reached their targets in America and scored 3,000 points for the Democrats.

If you’re scoring that way at home, I mean, which, being fair-minded and civilized, you surely aren’t.

Perhaps you don’t blame Bush for those 3,000 lives. So you might wonder why Cotton blames Obama for thousands fewer, even for terrorists’ attempts that failed.

Or maybe you need not ask because you already know: It’s just a little political sport, a little vulture swoop.

It’s the kind of thing you’re likely to see from time to time from a young Cheneyesque neo-con for whom the Club for Growth bought a cheap South Arkansas congressional seat.

Those five terrorist attacks or attempts that Cotton presumed to blame on Obama were the Boston bombing, the Fort Hood shooting, the Little Rock recruiting office shooting, the failed underwear bomber and the failed Times Square bomber.

By the ground rules of his game, you see, a president gets no credit for the blunder of a terrorist who had otherwise succeeded in getting himself into position to do harm, even if, as in one example, he had a dud in his underpants.

PolitiFact pondered Cotton’s scoreboard and pointed out the convenience of starting score keeping only after Bush otherwise would have fallen behind by zero-to-3,000.

Then it found three attacks or target-reaching attempts in the Bush years that Cotton had failed to record-the shoe bomber on an airplane, a Los Angeles airport shooting and a pedestrian rundown by an Islamic fanatic using a sport utility vehicle as a weapon in Chapel Hill, N.C., injuring nine people.

Then PolitiFact doubted the fairness of lumping terrorists’ attempts that got carried out successfully with attempts that went awry at the end.

Then it doubted another matter of fairness: Do we really want to keep score this way and blame the president, any president, for crazed murderers?

It’s one thing to hold the appropriate government agencies to account for whether they should have been more alert and vigilant. It’s essential to review job performances. It’s important to learn from mistakes.

And it’s fair to say all bucks stop at the president’s desk. But that’s not to say all dead American bodies ought to be piled there.

It prostitutes the storied heritage of American political rhetoric to take to the floor of Congress to declare that it’s all the president’s personal fault, or, precisely, all a Democratic president’s personal fault, though never in any way a Republican president’s personal fault.

That kind of crude partisanship would be unworthy even of a party’s political convention.

At the least, you ought to keep score fully and equitably if you insist on keeping score at all.

If you’re going to say it’s Obama’s fault that some guy got into Times Square with a bomb that didn’t go off, then you need to say it’s Bush’s fault that airplane hijackers had done real damage several blocks south a few years previously.

If you’re uncomfortable assigning either or both of those blames, then perhaps you would join me as we invite Tom Cotton to stop talking just as we previously invited Nate Bell to stop tweeting.

A postscript: Politico did an article Tuesday declaring that Cotton is the last best hope for Republican hawks wanting to defend the Bush administration for the war in Iraq. I thought it was a devastating hit piece.

But then Cotton’s press secretary distributed it as if it was a good thing.

———◊———

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 13 on 05/02/2013

Upcoming Events