Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank fisks Sen. Tom Cotton over his bellicose bluster during Gina Haspel’s contentious confirmation hearing for CIA director.

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Milbank says that Cotton “has surpassed Ted Cruz as the most disliked member of the Senate.” Heh.

“Colleagues and staff on the Hill report that he can be as nasty privately as he is publicly, as uncivil to Republicans as he is to Democrats,” Milbank writes. “He imputes ill motives to those who disagree with him. He served in the military but now treats politics as war.” Milbank runs through a greatest hits of items that have appeared on this blog: Cotton’s lying for Trump, nasty partisanship, fanatical opposition to diplomacy of any kind, blocking a qualified nominee to “inflict special pain” on President Obama (the nominees died of cancer and was never confirmed) and so on.

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Milbank gets rolling, but in the end, calls for civility and decorum in Congress tend to be pretty drab. Cotton is a tedious, hyper-partisan, deeply cynical political operator who loves to put on a demagogic show. There is cruelty in Cotton, but the trouble isn’t that he’s mean to his colleagues. We ought to worry more about the people whose names never make the newspaper, but who suffer at the hands of this rigid ideologue who has devoted his career to slashing funds for those who need it most here at home and cheerleading for ever more war and military aggression abroad.

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