Tough week to be a Graham
Platner pulled out. Lindsey is dead. And Mitch McConnell, while not a Graham, was pictured holding a newspaper like a hostage.
Hey guys, happy Sunday. Genocidal warmonger Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who was recently spotted holding a Little Mermaid bubble wand at Disney World after personally convincing Trump to bomb Iran, is dead. Theories about his death abound: The news says he had a heart attack; MAGA types are convinced that Putin poisoned Graham over his support for Ukraine and plan to sanction Russia; I’m convinced that the explosive diarrhea parasite got him in the end. Graham reportedly joked “I can’t die now” on the phone before his death Saturday night and refused to seek medical attention, despite feeling ill, because he was scheduled to appear on Meet the Press Sunday morning. (This would be the most Lindsey Graham way possible to go out, as he lived for those godawful Sunday shows.)
Whatever actually happened, it’s important to remember Graham as a spineless monster who never met a war he didn’t like, said Israel should use nuclear bombs on Palestinian babies and fought to strip abortion rights from American women. This was basically me this morning:
Donald Trump had the funniest possible reaction to the demise of his good friend Lindsey, with whom he apparently played golf “more than any other two folks in public office at any time I think in history,” firing off a flippant post that the senator “is dead!”
“So sad!”
Trump then called into Meet the Press, the show Graham supposedly died trying to go on, and claimed that Graham had used his final words to announce that he’d finally, miraculously gathered the votes to pass the SAVE America (voter suppression) Act.
This conversation didn’t happen. The SAVE America Act still does not remotely have the votes to pass the Senate, and Graham had just returned from a trip to Ukraine where he was not working on that bill at all.
So what happens to Graham’s senate seat? When he died, he was just three points ahead of his Democratic challenger, pediatrician Annie Andrews, in the polls. This is certainly a boost to her chances this November, depending on who steps up to run against her. South Carolina’s GOP governor, who was a member of a whites only country club until recently, gets to appoint Graham’s interim replacement, but I’m not seeing any options with remotely the name recognition and power that Graham had. Flipping that seat is a long shot, but far from impossible in a state slowly creeping to the left.
Speaking of states creeping to the left, over in Maine, Graham Platner was forced to drop out of his senate race this week after being accused of rape. I hate to say I warned y’all about him, in this very newsletter, back in October. The whole Nazi tattoo / Blackwater mercenary thing was enough of a red flag for me to want to drop Platner before his ex-girlfriends had to start publicly bearing their trauma, but the bar for white male senate candidates is apparently on the floor. At least the Dems remain a party that, for the most part, will push their own candidates out based on credible rape allegations, whereas Republicans will elect those men again and again.
As to Susan Collins’ seat, I believe it’s still winnable for Dems. Platner’s implosion was a huge setback but not a reason to abandon hope. We don’t know who the Democratic candidate will be quite yet, but I think the smart choice is logger and former Maine senate president Troy Jackson, who’s endorsed by DSA and apparently not a rapist with a Nazi tat.
In sum: Maine still winnable; South Carolina now at least more winnable than it was. A rapist out, a warmonger dead. And Mitch McConnell, who seeemed brain dead long before he was wheeled unconscious into the hospital a few months ago, is mysteriously missing. Republicans wouldn’t admit it if Mitch died before August 3, because doing so would trigger a special election for his seat, and GOP turnout during special elections in Kentucky is notoriously bad. But the speculation about McConnell’s death has reached such a fever pitch that if that man wasn’t at least medically brain dead, we’d be hearing recordings of his voice assuring us that he can still speak and form sentences; instead, we’ve got this photo today of McConnell touching a newspaper in the hospital like a hostage and looking very Weekend at Bernie’s. (The date of the paper is not clear, which might’ve helped their case.)
His full statement here insisting he’s alive. Either way, he’s not representing his constituents in the Senate and hasn’t shown up to work in months. Kentuckians deserve more than a smiling, propped-up corpse for a senator.
Everything feels like a metaphor lately, and I believe that terrible white dudes dropping like flies out of some of the most important senate seats and races in the country due to old age and heart attacks and rape allegations is trying to tell us something. Maybe that it’s time to replace all of these people with something vastly different.