The Washington Post‘s house conservative, Jennifer Rubin, knows that Lindsey Graham has next to no chance of winning the GOP presidential nomination, but she’s a fan of our senior senator, and thinks he has some things to teach the more likely candidates.
So it is that she has posted “Eight things to learn from Lindsey Graham.” Here are three of the items:
4. He is living proof that a conservative in a deep red state can win reelection while supporting immigration reform. He knows that an arduous path to citizenship or to legalization with penalties, payment of back taxes and other requirements is not “amnesty” and will be necessary unless we create a police state to round up 11 million to 12 million people….
7. He knows that the NSA is not reading the content of your e-mails or listening to your phone calls without individualized suspicion and the 4th Amendment does not apply to the data on calls equivalent to that which appears on your phone bill. He can also speak to the necessity of the program.
8. He knows precisely the state in which President George W. Bush left Iraq, the recommendations at the time, the Obama-Clinton determination to remove all troops and the consequences on our ability to maintain stability and redirect then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki away from sectarian activities (suppression of the Sunni) and toward inclusive government.
Related Posts
The senator wishes to thank you for your support by sending you your very own ”Hello Ken“ doll. The senator knows you’ll have loads of fun telling “Ken” all your most important secrets. He also encourages you to take advantage of the “Big Daddy” option, which transmits your hopes and dreams for America directly to the senator’s staff for prompt response – conveniently eliminating need for those tiresome old constituent gatherings and other public forums. Oh, and the senator wants you to know that you shouldn’t be the least bit concerned about privacy, because, as the senator says, If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about!
Have fun!
He knows precisely the state in which President George W. Bush left Iraq, the recommendations at the time.
-Rubin
Wow. That is a remarkable statement. Sadly this re-writing of history continues to rear it’s ugly head. Defenders of the truth must chop it off before it gains too much traction. By any reasonable assessment of Iraq comparing the situation when Bush took office to the state it was in when he left cannot be considered a selling point for a candidate who supported the actions that created the Iraq of January 20, 2009. This whole narrative that everything was sunshine and roses because of the heroic, noble and brave actions of Mr. Bush and company would be really laughable if it weren’t so tragically and horribly wrong.
By now it is completely and undeniably known that the Bush administration did not just cherry pick intelligence sources to launch a war of conquest but flat out lied about what the intelligence actually said. Bush declared “mission accomplish” just a couple of months into what continued to be an ongoing disaster. Then after 6 years of completely failing to accomplish anything positive, yet getting thousands killed and $trillions spent, Bush set up a timeline for withdrawing our troops. Somehow people forget that terrorist attacks continued right up to the end of the Bush administration. Some accomplished mission. After inheriting the horribly corrupt al-Maliki regime the Obama administration had little choice but to follow his predecessor’s timeline and pull our troops out. Al-Maliki simply refused any reasonable status of force agreement.
The entire mess, including the rise of ISIS and the increased Iranian involvement in the region was created by Mr. Bush and company along with enablers like Lindsey Graham. Any other narrative that denies the complete culpability of Bush and company is a damnably false narrative. Graham has been wrong on this issue from the start and he deserves nothing but condemnation for his outrageous, imperialistic and, most importantly wrong, description of what occurred.
“…did not just cherry pick….” bud
When it comes to “cherry picking”, anyone wanna take bets on whose basket is overflowing with “cherries” after reading the opinion bud posted? It works both ways and no one on either side has an empty basket.
#8
Well, here we are at the end of another round of remembering a war (the Civil one) that gave rise to one Lost Cause mythology and already there those out there eager to give life to yet another (this one led by the likes of Sen. Graham and evangelized by Rubin, Warthen et al), in this case about our most recent Iraq war. But like the “Who Lost China” debates of the early Cold War years, or the “Who Lost Vietnam” wrangling of the 1970s, this latest iteration of the lost cause myth is arguably no more sensical and certainly no more productive than its predecessors were.
7. I am still kind of fuzzy as to how when telephones came along everyone, government included, viewed telephone conversations as private and protected (even though these were routed through a companies operators, switches and systems) but now the courts and the government assert that our digital life – including cell phones and emails – are not private or protected at all.
I don’t think we understand what we have lost. Or the likely consequences. This is one of those issues where it is the self-labeled conservatives who are systematically dismantling the 4th Amendment. I find that striking.
Mark, that would be the “Patriot” Act w/r/t to previously private communications. I spoke out vociferously against it at the time–how hard is it to get a warrant, really? The judges are just down the hall from the prosecutors.
As far as emails go, I believe they were never private. I think it is either b/c of the inherent insecurity in the system (Professor Fenner’s Second Rule of Email–the first is not to judge emotional tone), or b/c the internet was originally Arpanet, developed by the government for security (LOL), thus, they get to make the rules.
Even the name is unseemly; I wonder if whoever named it did so with a healthy dose of irony and subversive double-speak?
Sam Adams would rage against such governmental treachery.
We don’t need to rage against the Patriot Act, but we would be wise to give some thought to the ways we corrode, willingly or unwittingly, our legacy of freedom and government of and for the people.
Long, long before most people encountered email, we were using instant messaging at the little paper I worked at in Jackson, TN.
Everyone on that mainframe system (which we started using in 1980) could send short, real-time messages to anyone else on the system. So we all eagerly started doing so, typing messages to people 10 feet away from us. We sometimes used it for work purposes, but it was also popular for sending a wisecrack about the person five feet from us to the person 10 feet from us. Unwise, given the human tendency to send the message TO the person it was ABOUT, but humans are frail.
There was a young woman who worked in the features department who was having an affair with a man across the newsroom. They conducted a torrid, explicit correspondence via the instant-message medium. They thought the messages were ephemeral, like Snapchat. They were wrong.
Something else they did not realize was that, storage of data being extremely limited on the mainframes of that day — which held only a tiny fraction of what our phones hold today — a guy in our IT department (which consisted of two guys) went through all instant messages each night and deleted them, one by one. He called up and read each and every message in the process. Someone finally told the illicit couple. Major embarrassment.
Don’t type anything into any electronic device that you don’t want the world to see….
To me, Graham only looks good by comparison. I thought at the time he was a pretty good trade for Thurman – then we got Demint to replace Hollings. Not even a wash. Graham is (to me) much more reasonable than most of the Republicans when he’s not campaigning down here, but if he tosses the hat on this one it could go either way. He might try for the less right-wing option if Jeb Bush gets hounded-out for the few moderate positions he holds, hoping for support from those Republicans who can’t stomach the likely early leaders who whip up support by using hard-right rhetoric (they seldom have concrete proposals).
I would expect a highly militaristic stance, running against people not in the race (Iran, Russia, terrorists) and a lot of pandering to the religious right on everything from gays to religious exceptions to laws to Israel as never-wrong in the Middle East.
On Immigration, I expect the true business-oriented Republican position to legalize status and permission to work cheaply and pay taxes but never, never, ever be able to vote. A “path to citizenship” will possibly be touted but it will be so unattainable that neither the immigrants nor their children would ever vote.
I also expect that any most any Governor (likely Bush) will be able to steal any support and most funding Graham would get (except that from military contractors).
Seems to me that the only point Rubin has that Graham is substantively different from any of the other GOP candidates is on the immigration issue. If you set Rand Paul aside, are any of the other potential GOP candidates really different at all from Graham on national security issues? Maybe she has a point on the immigration issue, but seems that the only other thing setting Graham apart is his flair for the dramatic turn of phrase in expressing his own (and by extension, what he feels should be all of our) sense of terror and fear.