If you look at the above graphic, it’s easy to get the idea that Sen. Tom Cotton is a heartless war hawk who believes prison and war to be more humane solutions to the threats facing America than compassion and the social safety net. He may well be every bit of that. He may in fact be as heartless, cruel, and inhuman as he is ignorant and xenophobic. If we’re to condemn him for his words and his dark, kill-them-before-they-kill-us worldview, there’s plenty of ammunition available to make that possible. What we don’t need to be doing is making up quotes out of whole cloth, the idea being to make him look even worse and more thoroughly inhuman.
I’ve read through Sen. Cotton’s floor speech- twice (an exercise I wouldn’t recommend to anyone who wishes to retain any hope for humanity). The quote from the above graphic is nowhere to be found. I’m not about to defend Cotton, because the alleged quote certainly isn’t out of character for him, but even at my most cynical I have to believe that the Senator’s smart enough to voice such sentiments in more muted and subtle tones.
Teapublican knuckle draggers like Cotton are one of the biggest threats facing this country, and they provide plenty of ammunition that can be used against them. Why do we need to make stuff up and attempt to pass it off as a verbatim quote? Unfortunately, this Facebook page does far too much of that, and it ultimately does a disservice to those of us trying to foster an honest dialogue while spotlight the evil rhetoric of Teapublican zealots.
Shouldn’t we be better than this? Shouldn’t we hold ourselves to a higher standard, so that the forces of darkness can’t twist our words and accuse us of hypocrisy in an effort to camouflage their own? If we don’t honor the truth, we’re no better than those like Sen. Cotton, whom we’d ridicule for being the worst sort of Teapublican troll.
Let’s stick to the truth. That’s awful enough without embellishment.
