After the bombings at the Boston Marathon this month, Cotton lashed the Obama administration for “failing in its mission to stop terrorism before it reaches its targets in the United States.” In one of several Sunday-show appearances this year, Cotton defended George W. Bush’s unpopular intervention in Iraq as a “just and noble war.” He told an audience at the 2013 CPAC gathering that fate of the equally unpopular Afghan war would come down to whether America has the raw will to win.
And at a closed-door March gathering hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, sources said that Cotton tangled with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over the GOP’s orientation on national security, answering a Cruz discourse on drones with what one attendee called an “impressive critique of the Rand Paul position and what would happen if the party went down that road.”…
“When America is standing up in the world and leading the cause of freedom and helping expand freedom’s domain around the world, America is always going to be safer,” Cotton said. “I think that George Bush largely did have it right, that we can’t wait for dangers to gather on the horizon, that we can’t let the world’s most dangerous people get the world’s most dangerous weapons, and that we have to be willing to defend our interests and the safety of our citizens abroad even if we don’t get the approval of the United Nations.”
Those are sentiments that may play well in Texarkana, but in some respects, it’s hard to see Cotton as the cure for what ails national Republicans. The party has many afflictions; a paucity of ambitious, white Southern conservatives is not one of them.
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