Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton blasted the media for trying to silence him by overexposing the Democrats’ radical agenda, not only by direct criticism but by the use of “fact checks.”.
The Arkansas lawmaker said this while appearing on Fox News on Monday, in part to discuss a recent correction issued by The Washington Post.
The issue began when the Post’s “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler tacked two Pinocchios onto Cotton after he claimed the Democrats’ COVID-19 spending spree would even give money to prison inmates.
Last March, Cotton had proposed a measure that would have prohibited federal coronavirus stimulus money from going to guests of the government.
“On March 6 at 10:12 am, the Senate voted on an amendment to exclude prisoners—like the Boston Bomber—from getting stimulus checks,” Cotton tweeted. “Every Democrat voted to send checks to prisoners, and every Republican voted to stop prisoners from getting checks.”
Kessler ripped that tweet as a lie, under a “fact-check” piece entitled “Murderers, undocumented immigrants: Hyped-up claims about who’s getting stimulus checks.”
“For all the hype, there’s less to these claims than one might imagine — particularly because the previous stimulus bills passed last year under GOP control also did not bar payments to prisoners and the small subset of undocumented immigrants,” Kessler wrote.
“Prisoner advocates say this is just theater,” he added. “Both of these talking points mainly are crafted for future campaign ads, not serious legislation.
Then, just last week, it was reported that the actual Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, did in fact receive a $1,400 COVID stimulus check. A federal judge ordered the funding be put into his account to pay victims.
Last week, Kessler then tweeted, “It turns out Tom Cotton predicted correctly — Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber, did get a stimulus check. So we’ve adjusted the Pinocchio rating on this 2021 fact check.”
But as Fox News noted, that was the second time The Post had to retreat from calling Cotton a liar.
Nearly two years ago, Cotton was among the first to suggest that the virus might have resulted from a leak in a Wuhan lab, rather than from bat contamination.
The Post accused Cotton of “repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.”
Then in May 2021, The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. intelligence officials, reported that three Wuhan researchers were hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019 — just before the first virus case was publicly reported.
The Post then corrected its earlier story, stating, “Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”
On Monday, Cotton told Fox News, “The reason they keep fact-checking me, though, is not because I’m not telling the truth. It’s because I am telling the truth. I’m exposing the crazy ideas of the Democratic Party and their praetorian guard, and the media doesn’t want to let me speak out to those truths.”
“I proposed an amendment that would prohibit checks from going to criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber; the Democrats voted against my amendment,” Cotton added.
“The Democrats said on the Senate floor that they wanted checks to go to prisoners, so murderers and rapists and pedophiles across America got your tax dollars last year – yet, The Washington Post used a fact check to call this a lie.”
“If the media wants to keep starting these fights with me,” Cotton continued, “I’m happy to finish these fights because the American people deserve the truth.”
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