Lindsey Graham just picked a fight he can’t win

| 6:00 pm EDT September 30, 2018
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Another day, another embarrassing new low for once-respected – and now mentally unhinged – Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. He spent the entirety of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings throwing one bizarre tantrum after another, baselessly attacking sexual assault victims, while trying to paint Kavanaugh as some kind of saint, even as Kavanaugh was in the midst of his own mental breakdown. Now Graham is picking a fight he can’t win.

Lindsey Graham has now decided that the real crime here is not the multiple sexual assaults allegedly committed by Brett Kavanaugh, or the numerous confirmed counts of felony perjury committed by Kavanaugh, but the fact that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s letter to Dianne Feinstein has gone public. Graham used his appearance on ABC This Week this morning to insist that “I’m going to call for an investigation of what happened in this committee ― who betrayed Dr. Ford’s trust.” To be clear, he’s targeting Feinstein.

Lindsey Graham has been in the Senate with Dianne Feinstein long enough to know that she’s equal parts politically savvy and careful about covering her tracks. The idea that she somehow committed an ethics breach – or broke a law – during the course of these hearings is laughable. Yet in his increasingly deranged and manic haze, Graham appears to have lost track of this basic information, and now he’s trying to pick a fight he can’t win. This is usually what self-destructive people do, and Graham has arguably become the most self-destructive person in politics.

No matter how many times the pundits insist that Lindsey Graham is simply auditioning for the Attorney General job, this is nonsense. Graham is throwing away his reputation, legacy, and Senate career with these antics – something he wouldn’t do simply to land a temp job in the cabinet of a president who will likely be ousted within six months. Graham is either being blackmailed into this behavior by Donald Trump, or he’s suffering a mental breakdown, or some combination of both.