Arkansas — 2nd District

Now that Arkansas' junior U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and 2nd District Congressman French Hill have resurfaced after disappearing for several months, their families can cancel the missing-persons reports and pull down all those sun-bleached "Have you seen me?" posters with their photos tacked up on utility poles across the state.

"Resurfaced" is a relative term in this instance, however. Neither one of them, it seems, is making actual public appearances, such as town-hall meetings or other events open to the general populace. Thus, there is no chance that so much as a solitary, carefully stage-managed encounter with a hand-picked fawning constituent could occur. (Although, to be fair, they weren't doing any of those things even before dropping out of sight.)

Both actually returned to the limelight via recent guest columns published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. No doubt, the newspaper exercised its usual due diligence to verify the source of the missives. But that's easy to get around--what with members of Congress being too busy to take telephone calls from non-campaign donors, and so many activities keeping them occupied while both houses were shut down for six weeks, along with the rest of the federal government. They both have numerous aides willing to answer the phone and vouch for them (as well as ghost-write the essays attributed to their bosses--with or without any help from humanity's new best friend, AI).

And, surely, it's simply an innocent, extraordinarily improbable double coincidence that the op-eds began appearing soon after each incumbent drew a viable opponent for their re-election bids in the 2026 elections. In the wake of those campaign opposition announcements, an unofficial count shows three columns appearing under Senator Cotton's byline, to only one (solely written) for Representative Hill. But, of course, senators' terms are triple the length of those for congressmen, so that's an appropriate ratio.

Well, the senator did show up on television recently, chiming in with his wholehearted support for the ongoing war crimes being committed off the coast of Venezuela by our country's military; "just following orders" from the civilian "leadership" of the aptly rechristened "War Department." The senator's resume shows he saw combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U.S. Army officer. As such, presumably, he would have been familiar with provisions of the Geneva Conventions concerning armed conflict.

But that was a long time ago, and such trivialities are easily forgotten ...

Apparently, the congressman has not yet commented about the rather obvious drone video footage released by the Pentagon, unapologetically documenting the follow-up strikes on helpless seamen clinging to floating debris from their boats previously obliterated by initial bombardments. But since the POTUS has already given his blessings to the operations, no MAGA Republican elected officials would dare offer even a hint of objection. Especially none among the Arkansas congressional delegation, "The Spineless Six."

After all, it was Confucius, or some other ancient Chinese philosopher, who famously once said, "Who are you gonna believe? Me or your lyin' eyes?" No; wait--that was somebody else; it's easy to get that quote mixed up with the one about a single picture being worth 1,000 words ...

But when much of this country's citizens shrug their shoulders and go back to staring numbly at their smartphone screens, perhaps it's too much to expect politicians to speak out against atrocities committed in the name of what used to be the United States of America, once a fortress of principle and honor that steadfastly condemned such acts by rogue nations lacking the same moral compass that formerly guided us.

That compass now lies shattered in some nearby dumpster. We have officially become one of the rogues.

In the climactic military courtroom scene from the film, "A Few Good Men," Jack Nicholson's character, Col. Nathan R. Jessup, USMC, bored and exasperated by the relentless and repetitious cross-examination of an upstart Naval attorney, for whom he has nothing but contempt, Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise), unleashes his snarling outburst that has become an iconic part of today's pop-culture lexicon: "You can't handle the truth!"

It turns out the colonel wasn't merely delivering a dramatic line in a fictional movie aimed at another character in the scene. He was speaking directly to the American public. Is anyone listening?

Doug Szenher of Little Rock retired from public/media relations with the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality after previously working as a newspaper reporter in Hot Springs and Texarkana.