Lindsey Graham knows better than to even try this
Lindsey Graham knows better. Other Republicans (such as Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Marsha Blackburn, Tommy Tuberville, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert) may be more consistently despicable, but they are dimwitted dullards who have never given any indication of having had a reasonable thought in their entire political careers.
But Lindsey Graham is different. He has, in the past, engaged in bipartisan efforts to pass legislation for the good of America or confirm judges from Presidents of opposing parties. He even had high praise for Joe Biden, in the famous car interview of 2015, saying “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, then probably you’ve got a problem; you need to do some self-evaluation.” Graham also said Biden was “the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in politics. He is as good a man as God ever created.”
On the political front, as recently as January 6, Graham spoke out against GOP attempts to cancel the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Arizona, and other states that had narrowly voted for Joe Biden to be President, saying “count me out. Enough is enough.”
In 2016, Graham rightfully called out candidate Donald Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and said that “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
But when Trump assumed office, Little Lindsey was reincarnated as a full-blown Trump sycophant, to the extent that he even failed to defend John McCain, supposedly his best friend in the Senate, when Trump viciously and unfairly attacked him.
To return our focus to the present, it is one thing for Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert to say that Joe Biden should be impeached. That’s what they do; they make nonsensical pronouncements that garner headlines and feed their egos, since they don’t ever work to try to pass serious legislation.
It is much more disturbing when Lindsey Graham — who twice voted to acquit Donald Trump, despite his clear guilt, during his Senate trials — now echoes Greene and Boebert and says Biden should be impeached for the messy troop withdrawal from Afghanistan that was set in motion by Trump (who as recently as June of this year boasted gleefully that he had started the process of withdrawing troops that couldn’t be stopped).
In April, Graham said that he “could not disagree more with former President Trump regarding his support for President Biden’s withdrawal of all forces from Afghanistan”; in fact, Trump’s only complaint at the time was that Biden was not withdrawing U.S. troops fast enough.
Yet, despite Graham’s strong disapproval of the fact that Biden is currently withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, he did not suggest that Trump should be impeached when he negotiated his February 2020 Doha Deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 (and to push for the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners). In fact, in February 2020, Lindsey Graham was voting to acquit Trump in his first (Ukraine) impeachment trial.
So Lindsey Graham knows better than to suggest that negotiating or implementing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan at this point is an impeachable offense. Nonetheless he is deliberately pandering to the ugly underside of the Republican Party that he once excoriated. This is inexcusable. As Tucker Carlson might say, “One has to wonder, why?”
