Lindsey Graham is scared, and he needs you to be scared too. He needs you to be very very VERY scared.
Yesterday, for example, the South Carolina Republican went on Fox News Sunday to demand use of American ground troops against ISIS, warning that if we don't fight them over there, well, then we're all gonna die.
Seriously. As Graham put it, "This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home."
"I am tired of hearing from this administration how easy this is going to be, when it's going to be hard and the consequences of losing, my friend, is if they survive our best shot, this is the last best chance to knock him out, then they will open the gates of hell to spill out on the world," Graham said. "This is not a Sunni versus Sunni problem, this is ISIL versus mankind."
Personally, I haven't heard a single word from anybody about "how easy this is going to be." However, I also don't think that ISIS has anything near the capacity needed to "open the gates of hell" for the civilized world.
Of course, this is all quite familiar. Graham and his sidekick John McCain, among others, used similar rhetoric to terrorize the American people into invading Iraq**, promising that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he would use against us, and that we were all gonna die. In his state of perpetual hysteria, Graham also advocates military action to destroy Iran's nuclear program and to force regime change in Iran, as if the Iranian people would respond to a major, sustained American attack on their soil by instituting a more pro-American government. It's lunacy.
Last September, Graham was warning that unless the United States intervened militarily against the Assad regime in Syria, "within six months – and you can quote me on this – there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program." His convoluted theory was that by intervening militarily in the Syrian civil war, we would demonstrate that we were serious about containing Iran's nuclear program. Without that intervention, we would eventually find ourselves under nuclear attack.
“It won’t come to America on top of a missile," Graham warned. "It’ll come in the belly of a ship in the Charleston or New York harbor.”
In other words, we're all gonna die. Again.
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** Here's Graham on March 2, 2003, on Meet the Press with Tim Russert:
"He says, 'I really have none. I don't have any weapons of mass destruction.' He failed to account for 26,000 liters of anthrax that we knew he was in possession of in 1998. He failed to account for 1.5 tons of VX nerve agent that could kill millions of people. He failed to account for 550 artillery shells with mustard gas. He has not accounted for things that we knew he once had. He is playing a game. The game is up, in my opinion, and we need to get on with the idea of disarming him and having a regime change, because it's in our national interest."
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