The Forgetful Senator Graham and a Flooded Two-Way Street

by Nomad

When it comes to helping people in need, Americans have always been fairly generous. Austerity-obsessed Republicans  however sometimes tend to forget what goes around, comes around.

The Great Flood of 2015
In the aftermath of extensive and deadly flooding in his state, Republican presidential hopeful Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is now making a pitch for much needed federal relief. The situation is pretty dire, from the news reports.

Some residents in the effected areas have lost everything. Even as the rains have subsided, the dangers are still mounting. Dams have been breached and other infrastructure have collapsed and rivers are still rising.
CNN reported yesterday:

Eleven people are known dead in the state due to weather-related incidents. Of those, seven drowned, according to the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. Four others died in traffic accidents.

Local media is proclaiming the flooding a "catastrophe of incredible proportion."

The Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, declared the flooding on this massive scale was a "1000 year event." A risky thing for her to say. It's almost (but not quite) as if she is saying that the climate has changed. Or something.
She'd better watch that kind of loose talk. In the past she has received campaign funding from the climate-change denying Koch brothers.
According to one source, “The Kochs love Nikki Haley." But it is a fickle kind of love as changeable as the weather.

Greenpeace points out that the brothers have for decades been actively financing climate denial groups and lobbying against a federal and state level any climate change legislation. It's really not much of a secret.

As you might or not know, Senator Graham is- in his meek and hopeless fashion- running for president and with a showing of less than 1%, right down there with Jim Gilmore, George Pataki, and Rand Paul. 

If an effort to show off his leadership skills, he told Wolf Blitzer:

"Let's just get through this thing, and whatever it costs, it costs.

Arming ISIS: The Danger of Listening to Warhawks

by Nomad

Two years ago, as the Syrian Civil War dragged on, Republican war hawks had the answers about what President ought to do in Syria. Sending weapons to the freedom fighting rebels was the only answer. 

Today we can see the folly of McCain's foreign policy solutions.

Back in February 2012, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were indulging in their favorite hobby, telling President Obama what he ought to be doing in the seemingly insolvable Syrian Civil War.
Their answer was to send American weapons to the anti-Assad rebels.

McCain's Folly

“I believe there are ways to get weapons to the opposition without direct United States involvement,” McCain told reporters at a news conference during a visit to the Afghan capital, Kabul, “The Iranians and the Russians are providing Bashar Assad with weapons. People that are being massacred deserve to have the ability to defend themselves.”

“So I am not only not opposed, but I am in favor of weapons being obtained by the opposition.”

In other words, the best policy was to return to the proxy wars of the Cold War.

(Nobody on the Republican side bothered to inform the senators that arming rebels in any country is a violation of international law. The International Court of Justice has in the past ruled that such shipments violated the UN charter. The last time this matter came up was curiously enough in the Reagan era with the covert arming of the Nicaraguan contras.)

According to a Wall Street Journal article (behind a firewall), legal advisers to President Obama repeatedly warned that aiding the Syrian rebels probably "violated international law and risked a direct conflict with the Assad regime."

Furthermore, it could easily lead into a larger conflict involving Turkey, Iran, Russia, Israel and other regional neighbors. The President had every reason to proceed with extreme caution. It's the kind of thing a president- as Commander in Chief- is paid to consider.

It was clear that the Obama Administration was never fully committed to the idea of sending weapons. In any event, it made no sense to openly discuss that option. What is the benefit of publicizing such a policy? 

The then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also a little less hawkish about the idea. However according to one source, (her own recently-published memoirs) suggests that early in the country's civil war, she thought the proposal was one option.
Importantly, she adds, that view was overruled by the president.

"The risks of both action and inaction were high, [but] the president [Obama]'s inclination was to stay the present course and not take the significant further step of arming rebels," she added.

"No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the president's call and I respected his deliberations and decision," she wrote, according to CBS News.

As we shall see,  Hilary's version of events was not exactly the final chapter in the whole story. Ultimately, everybody in Washington and in Europe agreed that the Syrian President Assad had to go but nobody could decide how it should be done.
For the war hawk Republicans, the most expedient way seemed to be shipping weapons into the country covertly. It had worked in other cases. After all, it worked for Reagan and the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan...hadn't it?

South Carolina's Lee Bright: A Closer Look at Lindsey Graham's Possible Tea Party Challenger

by Nomad

When you listen to South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, it’s hard to remember that according to his own consultant, he is “a thinking person's conservative.” 

Lately that's been a contradiction in terms.

Even if true, the question might be whether conservative voters in South Carolina would actually vote for a representative that thinks. It's a bit of a high standard.

They seem to prefer a politician that fights, that rants, that issues bold but essentially meaningless proclamations while refraining from any unwarranted brain activity.

These days Graham has been giving his constituents exactly what they crave. His recent embarrassing displays on the highly-politicized Benghazi investigation and his even more inept attempt to block the vote on the Hagel confirmation was a calculated strategy to establish his conservative credentials with his home state voters. So the crazier Graham appears on the national stage, the more votes he believes he can get back home. 

And this is the key problem with Republican party today. Insanity is the flavor of the month. And it is happening in many Red states, not just South Carolina.