Sunday, December 29, 2019

ANS -- How Lindsey Graham Convinced Me That Democracy is Dead

This one is even shorter than the last.  It's one more bit of explanation is the liberal quest to understand what the heck is going on with the Republicans and their falling in line with this train wreck of a president.
--Kim



How Lindsey Graham Convinced Me That Democracy is Dead

Karen Shiebler
Dec 16 · 3 min read
"Lindsey Graham" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Let me start out by saying that I have never agreed with Senator Graham on policy. He's a conservative. I'm a progressive.

I have never agreed with his views on economics or his views on foreign policy. I consider him to be a huge hawk to my little dove.

Nevertheless, over the past couple of decades, I have considered Lindsey Graham to be a man of integrity and a man of honor. I thought that he was a Senator who would fight for his own beliefs and values.

When Senator Graham referred to Republican presidential candidate Trump as a "kook" I thought he was an honest man. His full quote was this:

"I'm not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump because I don't think there's a whole lot of space there. I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy. I think he's unfit for office."

I agreed with him wholeheartedly and thought that it took some courage for a Republican to make such a statement.

Yay, Lindsey, I thought.

When the good Senator called on Trump to apologize for his racist birther attacks on then-President Obama, I was impressed with his integrity and his sense of honor.




I thought that it was the very definition of a functioning democracy to see a Republican Senator, a man with many years of service behind him, standing up to the man who was surging toward his party's nomination. At that time, I thought that both Senators Graham and McCain were living proof that in the United States, loyalty to the Constitution was more important than loyalty to the party.

I was wrong.

I was stupid, naiive and totally unprepared for the complete meltdown of the Republican party in the face of a morally corrupt, dishonest, self-serving despot as it's leader.

I expected Republican members of Congress to stand up, to uphold their oaths of office and push back against the lies, the nepotism, the personal enrichment of the President who somehow finagled his way past their best intentions and landed himself in the Oval Office.

But it never happened.

Instead, three years into the madness of King Donald, we see the once-revered Senator Lindsey Graham selling his soul for the chance to be reelected in a district that admires the mad King. We see him promising to violate the oath he'll be taking in the Senate as the corrupt President is brought to trial under impeachment. He said,

"I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here."

His mind is made up, says the Senator. He won't even pretend to uphold the oath he'll take. Trump is his king and he will bow down, kiss the royal ass and hope that all the bad stuff goes away.

Democracy is dead.

Senator Graham, along with his equally subservient boss Mitch McConnell, has made it absolutely clear. Under our current system of two parties who run the show, any President whose party has a majority in the Senate can do whatever the hell they want, laws and constitutions be damned. They will never be removed from office because the members of their party will follow in the footsteps of the spineless GOP of 2020.

They won't even pretend to be fair jurors here.

Why should they?

Democracy is dead in the United States of America.

Thanks, Senator Graham, for letting us know.

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