“He’s one of the worst people in all of congress and that includes the Democrats.”
This was conservative Matt Walsh’s assessment last week of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Walsh, a pundit at the Daily Wire, was responding to an interview the same day in which Graham was asked if American ground troops might be needed to invade Iran’s Kharg Island, which has a major oil terminal and is considered to be that country’s lifeline.
Graham had replied, “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this.”
The senator was citing one of the bloodiest battles in World War II.
Walsh wasn’t having it.
Today Lindsey Graham, who for some reason has been the White House’s top spokesman for this war, went on TV and invoked Iwo Jima while calling for more escalation in Iran. Iwo Jima of course involved 26 thousand US casualties. It’s extremely troubling that Graham has so much influence with the administration and has been so empowered to speak on its behalf.
Walsh then condemned Graham wholesale.
He is not conservative, he is not America first, he has never done a single thing in his career to advance the interests of actual American citizens, and he clearly wants this war to continue indefinitely and doesn’t care how many Americans die in the process. He should have no influence and no say over anything.
Other conservatives also called out Graham’s new low. Former Fox News host and popular podcaster Megyn Kelly slammed the senator, sharing on X a video clip in which she said, “6,821 U.S. service personnel died in the Battle of Iwo Jima. 19,217 were wounded. How dare he speak about it so cavalierly.”
She added, “He doesn’t have any kids. He’s not sending a young son or daughter into battle. F this guy.”
Former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said, “Lindsey Graham is a psychotic neocon who invokes Iwo Jima and is willing to send US Marines in to be slaughtered in Iran.”
Graham has made hyperbolic, deeply neoconservative pro-war comments that often invoke the mass killing of foreigners his entire career. But this time he appeared just as reckless and careless—even bloodthirsty—about sacrificing American lives.
Florida representative Anna Paulina Luna said of her fellow Republican, “I am deeply upset at the lack of respect for life Senator Lindsey Graham is displaying when talking about our troops. He is acting as if they are expendable cattle. This is unacceptable and dark.”
Graham’s fellow South Carolinian and Republican representative Nancy Mace went full bore on him in a series of X posts. Like Kelly and others, Mace also noted that Graham doesn’t have any children, yet seems eager to send other Americans’ kids off to war.
“Lindsey Graham needs to be removed from the Situation Room,” Mace wrote. “I don’t want to hear one word from a guy with no kids, desperately sending our sons and daughters into war on the ground in Iran.”
Mace wrote later, “Lindsey Graham has one foreign policy: send someone else’s kids to war. He was wrong about Iraq. He was wrong about Afghanistan. Now he’s wrong about Iran.” She would add in another post, “Lindsey Graham wants American troops on the ground in Iran. Not his kids. Yours. Not for freedom. But for the price of oil. Unless he’s suiting up for Kharg Island himself, he should sit down.”
Even conservative commentator Meghan McCain, whose late father Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was one of Graham’s closest allies in promoting neoconservative foreign policy, appeared sickened by the South Carolina senator. The younger McCain wrote, noting with others that Graham has no children, “Nothing like a single, childless, septuagenarian telling American mothers to send their children to go possibly die in a war.”
Critics of Graham have a point. Earlier in March, he explicitly said, “I’m going back to South Carolina and asking them to send their sons and daughters over to the Middle East.”
Democrats attacking a Republican of any stripe would be one thing. Republicans or conservatives attacking each other is also nothing new. Anyone, including conservative Republicans, criticizing Graham’s habitual warmongering is also not novel.
Yet, neocons like Graham are usually careful to couch their war lust in patriotic terms that at least appear to honor the American soldiers they always so quickly and eagerly want to send into battle.
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But Graham’s critics just heard a man acting as if massive American casualties were something frivolous or even beside the point when it came to his war plans. It was unfortunate. It certainly sounded dark. Perhaps even psychotic.
Graham also said in his controversial Fox News interview, “Here’s what I tell President Trump: Keep it up for a few more weeks, take Kharg Island where all of the resources they have to produce oil, control that island, let this regime die on a vine.”
That’s not the only thing that might die. Lindsey Graham seems more than fine with that.
