So Senator Tom Cotton watched the video of that strike on a drug boat and came out saying the two men in the water were “trying to flip the boat back over so they could stay in the fight.”
Let’s be clear:
That’s not how boats work.
That’s not even how physics works.
A go-fast boat is 30 to 40 feet long, weighs several thousand pounds, and has multiple engines hanging off the back. Two tired—and likely injured—men in the water are not flipping anything, except maybe themselves.
Anybody who’s ever spent five minutes around real boats knows this.
Those guys weren’t “getting back in the fight.”
They were trying not to drown.
Cotton’s version of events makes it sound like he thinks a blown-up fiberglass hull is a magic surfboard you can just roll over and jump back into action with. It isn’t. Once a go-fast gets hit like that, it’s done. Dead. Scrap. It’s basically a sinking bathtub at that point.
So when Cotton says they were still “combatants,” all he’s really saying is he doesn’t understand boats — or he doesn’t want to.
Either way, it’s a joke.
A bad one.
And anyone who’s ever driven, fixed, or even looked at a go-fast boat knows it.
