…repeat winner and perennial favourite Tom Cotton, no stranger to this space, whose special gift for demagogic chicanery and outright mendacity should probably qualify him for a coveted Standing Gomey at some point. Tom’s last big win honoured his astonishing claim that America’s biggest problem was that it didn’t send enough people to prison, and he earns today’s gong by harping once again on the MAGA-pleasing We-Need-More-Law-‘n-Fuckin’-Order theme, with an extra special assault on Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Just as an aside, I can never look at Cotton without thinking of Disney’s portrayal of Ichabod Crane, the unfortunate protagonist of Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Compare and contrast:
It’s uncanny. Anyway, you’ll perhaps recall the appalling reception Judge Jackson received at the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Republican members of which seemed determined to portray the nominee not merely as a soft-on-crime radical-left socialist, but a particular friend to pedophiles, upon whom she allegedly imposes overly lenient sentences at every opportunity. This was bullshit, of course – Judge Jackson’s sentencing record in child pornography cases is entirely in line with federal guidelines and the judicial norm – but it fit nicely with the new GOP narrative, now being pursued at all levels, that Democrats and their LGBTQ fellow-travellers are all child molesters and “groomers”. This is their new culture war shiny object, now that the lustre seems to have faded from Critical Race Theory. Never one to use a little hammer when a big one will do, Tom really took it to the next level, saying this about Jackson’s purported affection for the various sordid criminals the stinking Democrats and their stinking judicial appointees seem determined to set loose upon America’s unwitting innocents:
Do you hear that America?!? This – this – so-called Judge that the Dems would elevate to SCOTUS isn’t just a friend to pedophiles everywhere, she’s a gudd-dam NAZI. Why, she’d have run off to Nuremberg to seek clemency for the likes of Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels (those were famous Nazis), you bet she would!**
Like everybody always says, there’s never a headless horseman around when you need one.
For suggesting that the supremely qualified Ketanji Brown Jackson is simultaneously a radical left liberal and a Nazi, Tom Cotton storms to the front of a packed field and takes the prize. Here you go, Tommy-boy:
**Oh, and Tom, had she been around at the time, and had the Nuremberg tribunal requested she act as defence counsel to some of the accused, you know what? As an ethical lawyer and person of principle, that’s just exactly what she would have done, solemnly, soberly, and in sacred fulfillment of her duty under a system which insists that justice, as we conceive of it, requires that every accused gets a defence, in a court where the outcome isn’t rigged – part of what we call due process, strict adherence to which was just one of the many distinctions we were then trying to draw between ourselves and the Nazis.
the needlefish 