“We celebrated the 80th anniversary of D-Day. It was a failure,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on Sunday, June 9, 2024 (read story here).
Needless to say, this remark invited trolling. Prominent D.C. attorney Bradley Moss said, “Please tell me that’s fake.” Sorry, it’s not. An anonymous tweeter said, “He’s truly lost his mind.” Not really.
Graham, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, isn’t as stupid as the video clip makes him sound. It was merely an inartful way of repeating the history cliche that the war could have been avoided if Hitler had been stopped before launching World War 2. Continuing, Graham added, “We had a dozen chances to stop Hitler.”
Yes and no. With benefit of hindsight, and on paper, maybe. But not given the circumstances. France and Britain weren’t prepared for war with Germany in the 1930s. America was mired in depression, isolationist, and unwilling to fight another European conflict when our intervention might have made a difference.
The best trolling hit Graham between the eyes, excoriating him for calling out the world’s failure to confront fascism in the 1930s while sitting here supporting fascism in our own country today.
I’ve learned to expect hypocrisy and worse from Graham. In 2018, New Yorker called out his “partisan anger toward partisanship” (here). In 2019, I called out his impeachment hypocrisy (here).
In 2020, I asked, “Why does everyone hate Lindsey Graham’s guts?” and gave a list of reasons (here). In 2021, I called his military second-guessing “stupid” because it was (here). In 2022, I said he’d “misplaced “his last marble” (here) and suggested he “shut up” after more stupid remarks (here).
In a little over 20 years, Graham has gone from fresh-faced young senator (photo, above right) to a tired, cynical, shrill suckup to a convicted felon (photo, below left). He hasn’t improved with age; he’s the wine that turned into vinegar.
His descent from a respectable lawyer and military veteran to a bleating MAGA sheep hasn’t been pretty. His D-Day remarks aren’t a new low for him; that was reached in his post-2020 election behavior (details here).
The bottom line is that Graham isn’t a wise old man of the Senate; he’s a partisan hack all the way through, and you’ll get neither wisdom nor principle from him. His D-Day remarks just reinforce what has been evident all along.