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Yeah, Tom. Painting graffiti on plywood is just like firing cannonballs at an army fort. Cotton, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in government, apparently believes the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery; it was all about vandalism. Or maybe Arkansas schools taught Cotton that the North emerged victorious because Union soldiers stopped the Confederate Army from throwing rocks and breaking windows.

Tom’s been waiting all his life to use that analogy.

Cotton is a racism farmer. He plants it, waters it, cultivates it, harvests it and then sells it on the racism market. Even his name evokes sensations of white supremacy. “Thomas Bryant Cotton” sounds like someone who penned an 18th-century text on buck-breaking and during his writing breaks, he would stare wistfully out of his plantation shutters contemplating improvements on slave-whipping technology. Instead of playing cowboys and Indians as a child, I bet he played slave hunters and runaways. I bet he only became a senator to enact his secret plan to repeal the 13th Amendment.

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Of course, there’s no apt analogy for cops who would rather protect a building more than black lives. If only there was a story that included federal police officers, a riot and black lives. I’m sure Cotton would have used that one instead of conjuring up images of slavery.

Hmmm, well, there’s this:

On May 4, 1927, a white woman said a black man named John Carter “assaulted” her and her daughter. So, a mob of angry white men that included the police, hunted Carter down and hung him from a telephone pole in the middle of town. Then they shot him more than 200 times. Then they dragged his body through the middle of the black section of town.

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By this time, between 2,000 and 5,000 white people had arrived in the black part of town to take part in the act of terrorism. They pulled the doors off churches and buildings, set them on fire and burned John Carter’s body until the governor sent in the National Guard. When they arrived, they discovered a white man directing traffic…

With John Carter’s charred, dismembered arm.

When the police discovered what was going on, they spring into action. They hustled to town, gathered their tear gas and five men guarded the police station.

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The rest played cards.

No one was ever convicted of a crime, but when the mayor gave his report at the end of the year, the mayor praised the police saying: “The officers and men are high type citizens and are honored and respected as such by the people of the city.”

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Of course, there’s no way a senator who represents Arkansas could have known this more apt analogy even existed, except for one small detail:

All this happened in Little Rock, Ark.

Tom Cotton be racism-ing his ass off.