On Monday, some pro-Palestinian protesters blocked the Golden Gate Bridge, a tactic of which I’ve always been dubious, not least because it leaves the protesters vulnerable to the frustrations of people encased in a thousand pounds of easily accelerated metal and plastic. However, I never thought of the peril inherent in having a United States senator encourage such a denouement.

Enter Senator Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapdick from the state of Arkansas. From Mediaite:

Arkansas senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) joined Fox’s midday news programming and was asked for his thoughts. “Well, I feel very deeply for all those people who are trying to get to work or trying to pick up a kid. Very worried about the diversion of police resources where it needs to be stopping crime in cities like San Francisco, where firefighters are having to go there when they might have calls for fires out.”

He went on.

“I have to say, Sandra, I agree with you that you have to get to these—these criminals—early. If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let’s just say I think there’d be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement but by the people whose road they’re blocking. If they glued their hands to a car or the pavement, well, probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off, but I think that’s the way we’d handle it in Arkansas. And I would encourage most people anywhere that get stuck behind criminals like this, who are trying to block traffic, to take matters in their own hands. There’s only usually a few of them, and there’s a lot of people being inconvenienced. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.”

He later decided to convey these thoughts to the considerable portion of the world that doesn’t watch Fox midday programming. So he took to Xwitter to share them with the waiting world. If you’re keeping score at home, Cotton has moved on from calling on the military to shoot allegedly violent protesters. (Remember that comic episode? The only thing Cotton killed was the career of a guy at The New York Times.) Now he wants non-violent protesters thrown off the Golden Gate, if he can’t have them flayed alive in Bug Tussle.

The rap sheet grows. This guy wasn’t in the Senate for a hot minute before he was writing unsolicited letters to the mullahs in Iran in order to undermine the foreign policy of the Obama administration. And one can ask—quite fairly, I believe—how in the hell does he know what might happen in Arkansas when he spends so little time there? I suppose he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.

C’mon, you knew that was coming.


Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.