Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)
Sen. Tom Cotton continues to be a zealot on Iran.
Embarrassing himself and most of the other Republicans in the Senate with an open letter to the leaders of Iran wasn't enough, apparently. He's now pledging to do everything he can to block the deal that
would lengthen the time it would take Iran to produce a bomb from just a few months to a year. Extending that breakout timeline, though, is not what Cotton wants to see:
"I'm going to do everything I can to stop these terms from becoming a final deal," Cotton said Friday on CNN's "The Lead," noting it is unclear when the deal would attempt to lift international sanctions. [...]
"It was not a framework, it was just a detailed list of American concessions that is going to put Iran on the path to a nuclear weapon, whether they followed the terms...or they violate the terms," Cotton said.
Psst, dude, Iran was already on the path to a nuclear weapon. This makes that path longer.
But then, Cotton isn't speaking to the truth, he's making a pitch to scare voters. Nowhere is that more evident than when, in the same interview, he repeatedly insisted that President Obama had set up "the ultimate false choice" when he suggested that the options were, as Jake Tapper paraphrased, "this deal, or the status quo, or war." But what does Cotton want? Not war, he insisted. But military action that is not war ... that he'd be good with. Calling it war is a false choice, according to Cotton, but bombing Iran could be in a separate category. Because Iran would totally not respond badly to being bombed by the United States.
This is zealotry on display. Cotton is looking at a deal that would dramatically increase the amount of time it would take Iran to get a nuclear bomb and saying it's not good enough, but his alternatives are some fantasy of getting a better deal—the better deal that the Bush administration and years of harsh sanctions have not gotten—or the fantasy that war would not be the outcome of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. If he's being honest about what he thinks would happen, it's a sign that he's terrifyingly delusional. But it's just as likely that he is, like so many in the Bush administration, happy to lie to sell war to American voters.
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