Trust in our institutions continues to die small deaths every day in this country. It is because those in power, starting with those elected and entrusted to look out for the rest of us, so often only look out for each other. Their cockeyed idea of service so often involves only serving their own ambitions, or agendas. Or both.
So now you have two Republican senators, one of whom — Sen. Tom Cotton, who served his country honorably in both Iraq and Afghanistan — can only remember what they want to remember about an immigration meeting with President Trump. One during which Trump, according to multiple people in the room, raged about “s–thole countries.”
“You know what you don’t forget?” a former cabinet official was saying to me on Saturday. “When you’re in the room and the President says something about ‘s–thole countries.’ “
But Sen. Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. David Perdue of Georgia couldn’t wait to issue a joint statement — safety in numbers, always! — that said, among other things, that they simply couldn’t remember whether Trump used that kind of language or not.
Perdue once ran Reebok, back in the 1990s, and apparently put on a pair of his old sneakers before he ran the other way. Cotton, out of the 101st Airborne Division and the 506th Infantry Regiment, was in full retreat with him.
Cotton in particular showed just how large his own ambition is in allowing himself to be rolled this way. It would have been easier to just hire a skywriter to say how much he wants to end up as CIA director, a position for which he was rumored to be in line not so long ago.
Anyway, here is the joint statement Cotton and Perdue released about that meeting with the President, for everybody to press into their own book of memories:
“President Trump brought everyone to the table this week and listened to both sides. But regrettably, it seems that not everyone is committed to negotiating in good faith. In regards to Senator (Dick) Durbin’s accusation, we do not recall the President saying these comments specifically but what he did call out was the imbalance in our current immigration system, which does not protect American workers and our national interest. We, along with the President, are committed to solving an issue many in Congress have failed to deliver on for decades.”
The two of them sounded remarkably like another current jockey trying desperately to be a giant on the political stage, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, telling Congress that not only couldn’t he recall meeting with any Russians, he barely knows where Russia is.
Now Perdue goes on television Sunday morning and displays a sudden and amazing facility to recall what he couldn’t recall just a couple of days ago, as if his memory had suddenly come back.
“It’s a gross misrepresentation,” Perdue said to George Stephanopoulos on “This Week,” so many times that “gross misrepresentation” started to sound like it should have been part of a drinking game. He makes you rephrase a famous line from another guy with his last name: David Perdue wants to be a tough guy, but comes up looking like a tender chicken.
And here was Cotton on television on Sunday morning, with John Dickerson on “Face the Nation, saying that it is Sen. Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, who is the liar here along with the devil media, as Cotton reiterated that “I did not hear that word.” So Cotton becomes the latest elected official in this country to join a conga line of those you wouldn’t believe going forward if they told you that water is wet.
So in a week when Sen. Lindsey Graham finally stands up, Cotton goes down without even being hit. Honored soldier, now in full retreat, running with a lightweight like Perdue.
“The President and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel,” Graham said the other day. “I’ve always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals.”
We live in an America in which we are told to say something if we see something. Graham heard something the other day at the White House and stood up and said something to the President. Sen. Mitch McConnell? He’s said nothing about anything. House Speaker Paul Ryan has said hardly anything.
You know something that scares most Americans as much as false alarms about missiles? People like this, and all others in this Congress who continue to suffer from what has become such a familiar stomach problem in American politics:
No guts.
Lindsey Graham is right for a change. We do still want to be defined by our ideals in America. But those ideals are now trampled on a daily basis, not just by this President, but by those who enable him, sometimes with silence, sometimes with their own lies, as the country Graham described keeps disappearing further down a rabbit hole, if not a “s–thole.”
Maybe it isn’t the adult film stars who should be signing the nondisclosure agreements these days. Maybe it’s the adult stars in Congress.
