Just recently Secretary of State John Kerry ridiculed Tom Cotton, the Freshman Republican Senator from Arkansas, regarding the letter to the Islamic Republic of Iran that Cotton championed, and which was signed by forty-five other Republican senators. Secretary Kerry expressed disdain for the fact that Senator Cotton was “someone who had spent only sixty days in the Senate”.
It seems that Kerry, who himself served in the United States Senate since 1984 until he took over from Hillary Clinton as secretary of state following Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, feels that Senator Cotton’s brief tenure in the Senate just doesn’t measure up to someone such as Kerry who spent nearly twenty years in the so-called ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’.
I would argue just the opposite, that it’s to Senator Cotton’s credit that he has not been a career politician like John Kerry. That he hasn’t been corrupted by the power of politics as John Kerry has been for many years now. And that his positions are taken as a matter of principle, not as a matter of partisan politics which John Kerry practiced so well during his political career.
John Kerry is a perfect example of what is wrong with politics in America today. A career politician who is ego-driven and so far out of touch with the reality of the real world that all he can do is see everything through the prism of potential political gain.
It’s quite natural to expect that John Kerry would place so much value on being a career politician, since the political circles he has embraced for so many years continually feed each other’s ego, while they treat we the people with complete disdain. They firmly believe that we’re just too stupid to govern ourselves, we need the elites like them to take care of us.
Kerry cut his teeth denigrating the military and his country during the Vietnam War where he compared our military to the invading Mongol hoard’s of old, much like his colleague in the Senate Dick Durbin has done more recently. It’s obvious that Kerry would value Durbin’s lengthy time in the Senate much more than Tom Cotton’s much more brief tenure.
But to me what is much more valuable is Tom Cotton’s experience on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, where he saw firsthand the duplicity of the Iranians as they killed and maimed American soldiers on a daily basis.
Senator Cotton knows the record of the Iranians and understands the reality of negotiating with a nation that has no intention of living up to any agreement that is reached. The Iranians have proven many times over the years that their word is unreliable.
It seems curious to me how someone like Kerry who spent nearly twenty years in the U.S. Senate knows so much less than Tom Cotton who has been there for only sixty days.
Perhaps that’s a good indication that longevity in politics doesn’t count for nearly as much as honesty, integrity, and experience on the front lines defending America counts for. So I’ll take Tom Cotton’s sixty days over John