Wacko Tom Cotton and his China Conspiracy

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has a long history as a jerk, but he keeps dropping steaming piles of bullshit.  For the past month or so, he keeps pitching the theory that China is looking to “save face" by coming up with a vaccine before the rest of the world, and that that could only happen if China steals it from America. 

"The Chinese Communist Party has been stealing America's intellectual property for decades and they're not going to magically stop in the middle of a pandemic [...] In the middle of a pandemic, what's the most valuable intellectual property in the world? It's the research that our great laboratories and life science companies are doing on prophylactic drugs, therapeutic drugs and ultimately a vaccine. So I have little doubt that the Chinese intelligence services are actively trying to steal America's intellectual property as it relates to the virus they unleashed on the world."

Cotton keeps promoting the narrative that COVID-19 was a deliberate attack on the world, rather than a series of bungling missteps with a disastrous result (sorta like Trump's election).  Cotton contends China wants “credit" for coming up with a vaccine, which it will use as “leverage" against the rest of the world.

"It's a scandal to me that we have trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party's brightest minds to go back to China to compete for our jobs, to take our business, and ultimately to steal our property and design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people."

Cotton also suggests that if these Chinese spies want to infiltrate American institutions of higher learning, they should only learn useless crap like ... theater and the American system of government.

"If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America. They don't need to learn quantum computing."

Shakespeare's Caesar believed that men who “think too much" are dangerous. Republicans like Cotton prove that willful idiocy is an even greater threat.