Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:57 pm
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham once worried that “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term,” has changed his tune now that Republicans have an angry white guy in the White House.
Now, as Graham tells a radio audience it is past time Elizabeth Warren be silenced in violation of every accepted norm by a room full of angry white guys, he is talking as though it is Democrats who are the endangered species.
He took the opportunity Wednesday on the Mike Gallagher Show that,
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“The bottom line is, it was long overdue with her. I mean, she is clearly running for the nomination in 2020.”
Listen courtesy of CNN:
Yes, Lindsey Graham mansplained Elizabeth Warren’s silencing by a room full of angry white men as though it was justified by a belief she will run for president in 2020.
That’s rich coming from a guy who ran in 2016 and was already out of the race in 2015. There may be a bit of sour grapes in Graham’s disdain.
Needless to say, there is no Senate rule covering future presidential candidates. Graham’s colleague Orrin Hatch has already assured us telling the truth about somebody is no excuse.
Graham then explained to his audience that it was not Republicans who were running out of angry white men (Trump has a cabinet full of them to match those in the Senate chamber after all) but Democrats who don’t have enough “extreme voices”:
“The Democratic Party is being pushed really hard by the most extreme voices in their community, and they just don’t know how to handle it. If they empower her, then I think the Democratic Party is gonna lose way with the vast majority of the American people.”
Yes. This is the angry Southern male telling his Yankee counterparts they need to “handle their women” before their women get them in trouble.
Graham, like Trump, is missing the part where the Democrats won the popular vote and that the angry white guys only won because they got help from America’s enemy Vladimir Putin, a tainted FBI director, and the voter suppression efforts alluded to in the letter Warren was reading when they silenced her.
Bullies are ever so brave when they’re in a gang, and that is what those 49 Republicans were the other night in the Senate: A gang of bullies emboldened by their own numbers and by the misogynistic attitudes of the pussy-grabber in the White House who validates their disdain for women.
Graham’s words about angry white guys was a stark admission of the obvious that without the ‘angry white guy’ base there would be no Republican Party. Come 2015 and Graham was running for president against Donald Trump. Graham seemed to be pointing to the angry white guy vote then too when he complained of Trump’s lead, saying it was the “dark side of politics that Mr. Trump is appealing to.”
Graham was right about Donald Trump when he spoke on that long-ago Tuesday in August, even if he was wrong about “beating his brains out”:
He called Trump a “showman” whose “policy positions are complete gibberish.” Facts born out within the first few days of Trump’s administration. Graham also said of Trump that,
“He is shallow, he is ill-prepared to be commander-in-chief, he doesn’t know what he is talking about in terms of how our laws work, he says the worst things possible about immigrants and women, and he’s a complete idiot when it comes to Mideast policy.”
Graham said. “So I think over time, common sense will prevail.”
Common sense did not prevail. And Lindsey Graham was not the answer to or the antithesis of the “dark side of politics” that Trump is appealing to, or, as his own foolish statements about one woman in particular prove, a hero on a white horse come to save women.
Lindsey Graham knows a few things about foolish statements about women, having just told one to “shush” and let the men-folk speak.
The dark side instead has now come to roost in the White House and on Capitol Hill and Lindsey Graham is part of it. To paraphrase the central character on the BBC-FX show Taboo, Graham knows what evil Trump does, because he is part of it.
He is part of that dark side in politics. And like that character, he can never wash his hands clean of that “accountability and responsibility” for those foul acts.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
