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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLindsey Graham is dead. In 2016 he asked us to use his words against him. Consider them used.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18M3jZ3Uwm/The facts first, plainly. Graham died Saturday night at his Washington home of what his office calls a brief and sudden illness. He served four terms, chaired the Judiciary and Budget committees, and spent decades as one of the loudest voices in American foreign policy.
By sunrise the whitewash had begun. Trump declared him a "true American Patriot." Netanyahu called him a beloved friend. The eulogies will tell you about his service.
They will not tell you about the ledger. So we will.
In December 2015, Graham looked into a camera and called Donald Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." By February 2016: "I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy." That May he wrote: "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it." He refused to vote for him.
Then Trump won, and Lindsey Graham discovered golf.
By late 2017 he was scolding the media for calling the president, yes, really, a kook.
His best friend was John McCain, a man Trump mocked for being captured in Vietnam and kept mocking after he was dead. Graham wept for McCain on the Senate floor, then deepened his devotion to the man who spat on his grave.
The words he wanted used came in 2016, when he swore that if a Supreme Court seat opened in an election year, the next president should fill it. In 2018 he repeated the promise and added: "hold the tape."
In October 2020, as Judiciary chairman, he rammed Amy Coney Barrett onto the Court eight days before the election.
In November 2020, Georgia's Republican secretary of state said Graham had called him asking about tossing legally cast mail ballots. Graham denied it, fought the grand jury subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost.
On January 6th, with the glass still on the Capitol floor, he announced: "Count me out. Enough is enough." He was back at Mar-a-Lago within months.
He cheered the country into Iraq. Three weeks ago he was on television promising that if diplomacy failed, Trump was "going to take the Strait of Hormuz."
Honesty requires one more line: he was, to the end, one of Ukraine's most reliable champions in the Senate, and he died the day after standing beside Zelensky in Kyiv. Even a ledger this dark has an entry in the other column.
But the ledger is the legacy. A man who saw exactly what Trump was, said so in the plainest English of his era, and then spent nine years kneeling to it for relevance.
He asked us to use his words against him.
Consider them used.
dalton99a
(96,595 posts)Raven123
(8,095 posts)Zakaria was the interviewer but I do not know who he interviewed. The guest said Graham liked Trump because he (Graham) wanted to be relevant and got that from Trump. What a pathetic existence. Were it not for the harm he has inflicted on so many, I would feel bad for him.
dalton99a
(96,595 posts)
Solly Mack
(97,547 posts)Raven123
(8,095 posts)Thanks. Not a Facebook user so I appreciate the text.
Goonch
(6,099 posts)
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(139,357 posts)Dave Bowman
(7,613 posts)So the cowardly draft dodger calls him a patriot (lol!) and the mass murdering psychopath just lurves him to pieces. Now that's what I call extreme irony.
Grokenstein
(6,476 posts)That should be engraved on his tombstone.
Solly Mack
(97,547 posts)When you pretend Graham was something he wasn't, you only add to the whitewashing.
Don't complain about how Trump is changing or erasing history when praise of Graham is doing just that - trying to change the actual legacy/history of Lindsey Graham.
It's not being well-mannered. It's not being kind. It's not being decent.
It's telling a lie.
His actions caused harm. He enabled others to cause harm.
The scale does not tilt to the good. It bottoms out to the bad.
Bluejeans
(167 posts)I immediately went and urinated in salute to Graham and his constant war momgering, especially in Iraq.
BidenRocks
(3,725 posts)Jag Off!
sheshe2
(99,267 posts)erronis
(25,218 posts)anamnua
(1,535 posts)and thought: 'quite so; I couldn't have put it better myself'. This begs the question: when and why did he drink the cool aid? It reminds me of one of those robotically transformed characters in the Stepford Wives series.
It is said that everything that Trump touches dies. It is also true that everything Trump touches gets corrupted. I wonder if he had something on him.
No doubt his late friend, John McCain, is now having a few choice words with him.
Rump had dirt of Graham, serious dirt
Joinfortmill
(22,058 posts)kimbutgar
(27,777 posts)But I bet hell Lindseys BJs !
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(139,357 posts)Throw out all ethics and decency for the short-term gain of power.
Botany
(78,441 posts)Fuck him.
LiberalArkie
(20,003 posts)It has always been thought that he was being blackmailed.
Joinfortmill
(22,058 posts)QueerDuck
(2,501 posts)It all seems very plausible especially considering his fast 180 and getting so cozy with Trump... it was a bro-mance made in Heaven.
Iggo
(50,186 posts)Otherwise hard to explain that turnaround.
JCMach1
(29,292 posts)For the sanctions act he was about to push?