Not that you asked

I have found the perfect running mate for Donald Trump. Like Trump, he likes to call people names. He also thinks he knows more than anyone else. The only thing that might keep Trump from offering him the spot is because he might remind him of Ted Cruz. The person is our junior senator, Tom Cotton.

Cotton came into the Senate in 2015 in a fighting mood, and if anything, he has only gotten meaner. In office for only a month, he wrote a letter to the leaders of Iran telling them not to sign a deal with the United States and four other countries because the next President could kill the deal. Incredibly, almost every Republican in the Senate signed the letter, including the usually responsible John McCain. In the old days of the Senate, if a freshman Senator came up to a veteran Senator and asked him to sign a letter he had just written, the veteran would have said something like, "You see your desk over there? Get to it and sit down. I don't want to see you or hear your voice until you've been here at least three years."

As I mentioned above, like Trump, he likes to resort to name calling with people he disagrees with. He practically called President Obama's press secretary a coward and idiot in military affairs because he had no military experience. Cotton claims that his military service in Afghanistan and Iraq make him qualified to make defense policy. Cotton has every right to be proud of his military service, but since he still thinks that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, he's no expert on military policy.

Recently he took to the Senate floor to deliver a rant against Minority Leader Harry Reid. To be honest, I don't care for Reid, but I don't have to work with him. Calling the opposite party's leader "cancerous" is no way to win the hearts and minds of that opposition. There's always been an unwritten rule in the Senate that the members treat each other with courtesy and respect on the floor. Cotton, like Cruz, doesn't seem to think that rule applies to him.

Actually, I am hoping ferociously that Trump does choose Cotton as his running mate. No self-respecting Republican wants the job, and Cotton's ego wouldn't let him say no. Their appearances would sound more like the old Saturday wrestling show than a political campaign. Once Cotton was getting national exposure, he would go from being Arkansas' hidden embarrassment to a national one. Hopefully his performance on the national stage would convince Arkansas voters to reject him in 2020.

Who am I kidding? There are still plenty of people who will vote for him, as well as Trump, because they refuse to believe the truth even when it is right in front of them. Just last week, a letter writer to the Sun wrote that President Obama was not a citizen, was a Muslim, was trying to destroy the country, and had ruined the economy. There is plenty of evidence available to prove that all of those accusations are false, but people like that letter writer won't accept the truth because they don't want to.

Too many people read the National Enquirer and watch Fox News not to be informed, but to hear and read things that they already believe. When the New York Times or Time magazine reports a truth they don't want to know, they reject it by calling them the liberal media. They forget that those same sources ignored Watergate for a year, loved Ronald Reagan, and supported the invasion of Iraq. These are the people who have allowed a man like Donald Trump to become the nominee of the Republican Party for President.