Tom Cotton, Finally Standing Up

IN THE AGE of privately owned universes and alternative facts, we are entitled to our own facts and multiple, shifting versions of history, all deeply held and defended. Senator Tom Cotton was in the room when president Trump either did or did not call Africa a shithole. Cotton's three versions, and counting, offer evidence of parallel universes, or, more likely, of obfuscation, prevarication, and disassociation. In the first version, he doesn't know whether Trump waxed vulgar, presumably because he wasn't listening, or had ears, and heard not, not wanting to. Version number two has it that the president used strong language but most certainly didn't cross the line into indecency, wherever the line wanders these days. In the third remake, the jig is up, and Africa becomes, beyond all doubt, a shithole. Tall Tom, shittin' in tall cotton, a bit over his head. Tall tom, rediscovering his Harvard upbringing, and progressive relativism, but, at long last, standing up, owning up, and defecating on the high road, which for him is simple acknowledgement of verified reality. Oh, what a prize he must have been among the Harvard Crimson. Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, a pair of backward looking misfits in a bastion pf progressive absolutism, where facts remain facts, and, once verified, linger long, firmly entrenched in the pantheon we tenuously call "the real world", even if inconveniently.