Stephen Karganovic
Lindsey Graham was a degenerate and a disgrace, even if viewed entirely within the context of his public life.
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, goes the adage of the ancient Romans that every schoolboy knows. Regrettably, in the case of the recently departed Senator Lindsey Graham finding laudatory words is a nearly impossible task. George Galloway was on point in calling Graham "a perfectly revolting specimen, and a poor excuse for a human being." Galloway also ventured some very cogent speculations about the circumstances and causes of Graham's truly unexpected and otherwise not easily explicable death.
Decent people will not pop champagne bottles at the news that the annoying political caricature that we had all become accustomed to watch on television screens is no longer here to keep our blood pressure high. But neither will they issue any hypocritical statements of regret. Lindsay Graham was not a patriot, as in their insincere eulogies some of those hypocrites are now shamelessly claiming. He was a national embarrassment to America, and in the midst of intense competition he in fact stood out as such, as a towering figure in that pathetic bunch.
Lindsay Graham leaves behind the legacy of an inveterate, bloodthirsty warmonger. The appropriate expression - jingoist - has unfortunately gone out of fashion but it describes Graham's mindset perfectly. He thirsted for conflict and war the way normal people thirst for peace. And he did not see a war anywhere that he did not like.
His debut in the jingoist camp was in 2003 when he expressed strong support for the war on Iraq to "disarm" it and confiscate its non-existent weapons of mass destruction. More recently he became a vocal supporter of the neo-Nazi Kiev regime and lobbied insistently for it to be supplied with unlimited quantities of weapons and money to conduct its operations. In 2023 whilst visiting V. Zelensky, a "statesman" of matching calibre, he made the ghoulish statement that funds expended on the corrupt Kiev regime are the best possible investment because it would ultimately lead to the seizure by Ukraine's senior partners of vast natural resources and, as an extra dividend, facilitate the "killing of tonnes of Russians." The public expression of such sick sentiments by a high-ranking government figure provoked nary a criticism in the political chambers or media outlets of the civilised collective West.
Lindsey Graham never personally killed anybody, as far as is known. But to earn the status of a mass murderer he did not have to. In Iraq, Ukraine, and Iran he advocated acts of inhuman retribution and destruction clearly targeting the civilian population. His incitement resulted in large-scale slaughters that others were encouraged or made to engage in and commit on his behalf.
The sheer lunacy of his foreign policy ideas was on display in May of 2024 when without batting an eye Graham urged the nuclear bombing of Gaza. What made him imagine that the fallout could be confined to the territory of the 12-mile-wide strip without harming his friends in the region, he did not bother to disclose. One supposes that just the thrill of nuclear apocalypse was enough for him.
He pointedly compared the conflict in the Middle East with the war in the Pacific which in 1945 resulted in the nuclear obliteration (one of the choice expressions in this Air Force JAG corps [legal department] colonel's vocabulary) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which in Graham's opinion should by no means remain one-off events. "Just flatten it," was Graham's solution to the conflict in Gaza, presumably to clear the ground for the luxury resort that is planned there. "We flattened Berlin, we flattened Tokyo," Graham further elaborated his foreign policy rationale.
What have the good people of South Carolina had to say about the evident mental instability, to put it politely, but actually clinical derangement if we are to speak with permissible candour, of the man who until a few hours ago represented them in the highest legislative body of the land ? They are known to be conservative and patriotic, and not at all stupid, but for many terms he kept being elected by them (even before Dominion vote counting machines were invented) to the House of Representatives, and then to three terms in the Senate. In June of this year in the Republican primary he beat his challengers with more than 58% of the vote. Now that was in the Dominion voting era to be sure, but it is impressive nonetheless. Quite a few South Carolinians seem to have thought that Graham was actually doing something beneficial for them and not just for the Military Industrial Complex or the foreign entities to which he was publicly and unabashedly swearing allegiance at every opportunity.
It seems that a good case could be made that the electorate which tolerated him in office should share some of the guilt for facilitating Graham's malfeasance, as accessories at the very least.
Psychological theories purporting to explain Graham's disgusting public conduct in terms of some private complexes deeply embedded in his psyche have been circulating for some time and they predictably emerged again in post-mortem analyses. We do not propose to pursue that particular rabbit hole and will let such private matters remain outside the scope of public scrutiny, however relevant they might be. Suffice it to say that, whatever psychological or other mechanisms might be at play, Lindsey Graham was a degenerate and a disgrace, even if viewed entirely within the context of his public life.