Betting against Tom Cotton has become a dicey proposition. In 2020, the Arkansas senator suggested the eminently reasonable possibility that perhaps the coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, was the result of a leak from a local laboratory that experimented with precisely such infectious material. The Washington Post’s “fact-checker” sneered, echoing many in his industry, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” Once it became clear that Cotton’s contention was certainly plausible and entirely rational based on the evidence, the Post admitted it was neither a “conspiracy theory” nor “debunked,” and had never been either of those two things. In 2021, Democrats defeated a Republican amendment to the stimulus bill, the result of which, Cotton said, would mean incarcerated individuals such as the Boston bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, would receive a check from the government. Again, the Washington Post led the outcry, giving Cotton “two Pinocchios” for “scaremongering,” “theater,” and “not serious legislation.” And then — you guessed it — Tsarnaev did indeed receive a stimulus check. Cotton’s predictions don’t spare his own party either. The 2018 First Step Act, signed by President Donald Trump, was aimed at reforming sentencing. Cotton warned violent crime would rise in its wake, and now says events proved him right. In all cases, Cotton believes ideological thinking is blinding the political class to reality. “All these things are, in my opinion, just commonsense observations about basic...