March 12^th

Today we’ll look at South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s talk at a New Hampshire meeting of politicos. The Senator said that if he were elected President, the first thing he would do would be to call out the army, surround the capital, and keep the legislators in session until they had restored all the recent military cuts. An observer claims that this comment was met by some mild and amused snickers. Maybe that was because no one took the Senator seriously; his chances of winning the Republican nomination are not zero because that would be mathematically impossible.

Subsequently, David Weigl, writing for Bloomberg News tells us that a Graham staffer claimed the Senator’s was “not to be taken literally.”  (So maybe this was a metaphor?) Graham really had no other choice: he could say he was joking, although he didn’t say that—a staffer did; or he could say he was dead serious in which case he was dead, at least his candidacy would be dead. Telling the world that you would use the armed forces to mount a coup to enforce your views if you became President will not get you friends, except perhaps among the lunatic right. Graham’s remarks coupled with his mentor McCain’s “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” are enough to move most anyone toward paranoia…forget the 47 Senators attempting to scuttle peace talks.

Maybe Graham’s remarks were motivated by fear for his country’s safety, a desire to strengthen our military in a clearly unsafe world. Well, perhaps; but there is another possible motivation, one common among Republicans: money. If this military spending is restored who benefits? The citizens of South Carolina do and they benefit enormously; they have about 900 defense contractors and eight major military bases. Together these pump enormous amounts of wealth into the state. Out of a population of 4.7 million people in South Carolina 65 thousand are military. In Michigan, by contrast, in a population of slightly under 10 million just 33.5 thousand are military. Military spending is very important to South Carolina. This could account for some of Lindsay Graham’s hawkishness.

It is worthwhile to note that while Graham wants to restore those awful and reckless military cuts he nowhere suggests how they might be paid for.