I am about to speak ill of the dead.
I conferred with my Catholic intellectual friend Sunday and he informed me that according to Church teaching, a Roman Catholic is not committing a sin praying for the death of a person if by continuing to live that person poses a real threat to a significant number of innocent lives.
We would not have been committing a sin by praying for Hitler’s death in 1934, for example.
Obviously many of my readers do not share my Faith nor would I expect them to do so.
But I did intend this to be a riposte to the idea that one should never speak ill of the dead. If you are not committing a sinful act according to the Church (my moral compass) by praying for the death of a proponent of the mass death of innocents on earth, then you logically are not committing a sinful or distasteful act speaking ill of the recently departed.
Many of the negative reactions to Lindsey Graham and his death center on the assumption that he was homosexual. And they resulted in rude suggestions about his lifestyle. Low hanging fruit, so to speak.
However I do not pin my opposition to Lindsey Graham solely on his personal orientation.
In my quarter century working for Ron Paul several colleagues – including my closest friends – have been homosexual. Others have also been promiscuous or sinful in other ways.
But I will say one thing about Sen. Graham. He embodies everything wrong and sick about the American political class. And about American foreign policy.
A childless and unmarried member of the “boomer” generation, he has advocated over his four decades as a politician in favor of every war and foreign conflict that has been backed by his foreign interlocutors and their paid agitators inside the Beltway. Whence the money flows.
Graham is the epitome of who the great Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about in his masterpiece, Skin in the Game, in that his political positions are untethered to his existence in the real world.
“Russians are dying,” he told the Ukrainians to encourage them to continue in their disastrous proxy war with the much larger country. “It’s the best money we’ve ever spent.”
But Graham is not spending his money. He is spending our money – almost $200 billion but likely more. And the Russians are not the only ones dying. Millions of Ukrainians have also been killed fighting Graham’s proxy war against Russia.
Whatever the case and whatever your view on the war, each of those millions of Russians and Ukrainians had wives and children and families who loved them and who have been devastated by the end of the most important person in their life.
Graham did not care about any of this because there was no one or nothing important in his life beyond power. He was there in 2014 advocating for the overthrow of the democratically-elected government in Kiev and he was there again two years later urging Ukraine to launch an offensive against the much more powerful Russia.
“Your fight is our fight,” he told the Ukrainian soldiers in 2016. “Take the offensive to Russia.”
But their fight was obviously not Senator Lindsey Graham’s fight. Senator Graham went home to his tony flat on Capitol Hill with untold luxuries and a net worth of millions, despite his relatively modest official salary.
Ukrainian soldiers – most of them violently conscripted – were rotting in foxholes, waiting for Russian drones to put them out of their misery.
Likewise, Graham’s colleagues return to their positions at the apex of US power with no sense of the repercussion of the polities they advocate and enact.
Gasoline is five dollars per gallon? You have to break a few eggs to defeat the Ayatollahs. Meanwhile there is literally not a single American whose quality of life or security has been diminished by the fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran has elected to follow a theocratic form of government.
The Strait was open before on Graham’s “expert” advice Trump launched a war with Iran that led to its closing.
Just like there was not a single American who was inconvenienced by the fact that an Assad ruled Syria or a Gaddafi ran Libya. Or even that a Saddam Hussein ran a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 despite Graham’s lies to the contrary.
Americans have been propagandized by the Grahams of the world into believing that their lives depend on killing everyone Washington’s neocons decided were their enemies. And the corporate media provided him endless time to make that case. Graham dominated the Sunday “news” programs every week.
The real one-party state: the war party.
They become unimaginably rich while we sink into the slow-motion murder of inflation and national debt.
We are raising the next generation, a generation with no hope of purchasing a house or starting a family. The only thing they may be inheriting from the Graham generation, ironically, is the nihilism that there is no truth and nothing matters. “If they could feather their next stealing from my generation why should I follow any archaic rules?”
That is the lesson of the Grahams and also the Cruzes and the Cottons and 95 percent of our ruling class.
We need a revolution in the United States. Who knows…maybe we’ll get one.
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