By now you have surely heard about the death over the weekend of Lindsey Graham, longtime U.S. senator from South Carolina.
Let's start here: it is all right to say bad things about a deceased person. The history books are full of bad deceased people about whom bad things continue to be said to this day.
To be sure, we should not publicly air a deceased man's private vices, since that serves no good purpose but gossip. But if a man was responsible for evil, and it is an evil that men continue to cheer, it would be irresponsible to remain silent as his death is used to validate and encourage the evil he supported.
It has been downright embarrassing to watch what's left of MAGA become cheerleaders for Lindsey Graham, whose support for amnesty placed him exactly on the opposite side of what is supposed to be the President's flagship issue, but issues and consistency no longer matter.
Graham was on the wrong side of every foreign-policy matter I can think of. Even leaving aside Russia, where Graham was especially bad, a quarter century of a "War on Terror" cheered by Graham has only intensified every trend its architects said they wanted to slow or reverse, and has nothing to show for itself apart from debt and death. I would be mortified if I had to defend that.
America bored Lindsey Graham to death, which is why he was allergic to America First. Americ First means: we have problems enough in this country to keep ourselves occupied until we're all six feet under, and despite the temptation to take our eyes off that ball by maintaining an empire, our primary concerns are here at home.
One thing conservatives and libertarians have in common is that unlike the left, they reject grandiose schemes at home or abroad in favor of hearth and home, the immediate and mundane.
They realize that, human nature being what it is, their expectations for what can be achieved in this world must be modest and finite, and that if they can raise their children in peace and bequeath to them what is good and beautiful, that is plenty to hope for.
G.K. Chesterton reminded us that the genuine patriot boasts not of how large his country is, but always and of necessity of how small it is, and Nathaniel Hawthorne once remarked that a state was about as large an area as the human heart could be expected to love.
Thomas Jefferson’s ideal political order, although committed to states' rights, called for an even greater decentralization than that, in which a self-governing ward (a small section of a county) would make virtually all of its own own political decisions without outside interference. He envisioned a hierarchical structure of ward, county, state, and finally national government, and his goal was a system in which no entity of a higher order would infringe on the just prerogatives of one of a lower order.
In other words: small. Finite. Concerns that are immediate and specific.
The prosaic pursuit of bourgeois life? Bo-ring, said Lindsey Graham.
"You can't have a healthy home and a worldwide empire," said the great Bill Kauffman at Ron Paul's Rally for the Republic. "They can't coexist. You can't care about Baghdad and your own back yard."
He went on (this is from 2008):
"McCain chooses Baghdad. We take our stand in our back yards, on our front porches, in neighborhood diners and sandlot baseball diamonds, and country churches, and rock and roll clubs, and volunteer fire departments, and all those preciously little voluntary institutions that are the lifeblood of this beautiful country."
Lindsey Graham was bored to death with America. I'm not. There is so much to love and to cherish -- and to fix -- in this beautiful country.
Graham chose Baghdad over his back yard, and we are living with the consequences.
Meanwhile, our friend Scott Horton, the anti-Lindsey Graham, continues to expand his on-demand, enjoy-at-any-time-of-day-or-night Scott Horton Academy with more offerings (many of which have the effect of undoing Graham's propaganda).
I remember when people used to say, "I like Ron Paul except for his foreign policy." I would think: his foreign policy is the best thing about him!
I trust that by now most of those people have figured things out.
Step by step, block by block, Scott -- in the professorial, teaching mode he rarely gets to display on podcasts -- will make you an expert on by far the most important issues of the day, against the bipartisan War Party's deformation of America.
They lie about every last thing, and Scott refutes them all.
For a few days only, coupon code WOODS gets you a bigger discount than usual:
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