Rare News Desk
I hate those “Miss me yet?” billboards featuring George W. Bush.
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What conservative would miss a president who helped grow discretionary spending twice as fast as Bill Clinton, created the biggest new entitlement since LBJ, doubled the Department of Education, and transformed a $127 billion surplus into vast deficits?
I suppose Barack Obama is bad enough to make one miss King George III. But even here Bush isn’t blameless: without his failures, it is impossible to imagine we would be living through the audacity of hope right now.
Bush remains an electoral drag on the Republican Party even now. A plurality of Americans still says they blame the former president for the weak economy rather than the current occupant of the White House. Republican-blaming didn’t dip below 50 percent until February of this year.
Unfortunately, almost nothing is ever so bad that it couldn’t get worse. That’s the thought that immediately came to mind reading Stephen “The Connection” Hayes’ latest piece in the Weekly Standard on the return of the Republican hawks.
Carrying the most frightening title since Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Hayes’ story contained this bit of terrifying news: Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s senior senator, is considering running for president.
That would be the same Lindsey Graham who makes George W. Bush look like a principled fiscal conservative at home and like a model of peace and restraint abroad. To Graham, the $1 trillion Iraq war was just an appetizer.
“If I get through my general election, if nobody steps up in the presidential mix, if nobody’s out there talking—me and McCain have been talking—I may just jump in to get to make these arguments,” Graham threatened or promised.
And that “me and McCain” would be none other than John McCain, the expert on Republican electoral triumph who lost to Obama in 2008.
“I’ve strongly encouraged him to give it a look,” McCain told the Weekly Standard. “I think Lindsey has vast and deep experience on these issues that very few others have.”
Not everyone is willing to perform their foreign policy to the tune of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
Graham believes that the American homeland should be considered a battlefield, a concept that has troubling implications for the Bill of Rights. Graham’s view of civil liberties is perhaps best summarized by this outburst in defense of indefinite detention on the Senate floor: “Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer!”
You see, Graham is of the view that innocent people have nothing to fear from sweeping surveillance or broad detention powers. He seems to think that the government might have trouble launching a health care website, but it is infallible in determining the guilt or innocence of individual Americans.
While the rest of the Republican Party was rallying behind Rand Paul’s drone filibuster, Graham joined McCain in dismissing the campaign against extrajudicial killings as a political stunt.
In fact, Graham said the filibuster convinced him to vote for Obama’s nominee to run the CIA, just as he voted for both of Obama’s nominees to the Supreme Court.
“I am going to vote for Brennan now because it’s become a referendum on the drone program,” Graham was quoted as saying.
As to whether and under what circumstances the president has even the theoretical power to order the killing of American citizens at home, Graham said, “I do not believe that question deserves an answer.”
Graham thus sided with Obama appointees John Brennan and Eric Holder over the Constitution and limited government.
Perhaps the most telling comments from Graham’s interview with the Weekly Standard came when he threw colleague Marco Rubio under the bus. Rubio has pushed a warmed-over Bush foreign policy, but has also promoted some authentically conservative initiatives.
He’s a good guy, but after doing immigration with him—we don’t need another young guy not quite ready,” Graham said. “He’s no Obama by any means, but he’s so afraid of the right, and I’ve let that go.”
In other words, Rubio responded when conservatives saw the Gang of Eight bill for what it was—an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Graham has let that go.
This is the kind of arrogance that results when the tea party fails to recruit quality challengers for incumbents like Graham. It’s like when Bush supposedly said there was no conservative movement because he “whupped [social conservative activist] Gary Bauer’s ass” in 2000.
Graham previously let go of his fear of the right on taxes when he said he would be willing to violate Grover Norquist’s pledge against tax increases.
He said “the only pledge we should be making to each other is to avoid being Greece” in the same breath as he opposed sequestration—the only meaningful spending concessions won by congressional Republicans under Obama—because it “would destroy the United States military.”
War and drones are in, the Norquist pledge and the Bill of Rights are out. Nothing is certain with Graham but death and taxes.
If he somehow got elected president, I might start erecting “Miss me yet?” billboards of George W. Bush myself.
