Don’t be fooled: Lindsey Graham & GOP Establishment just as Crazy as Trump

[marmar]

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Lindsey Graham has been posing as the voice of reason in the Republican Party for the past few weeks, warning Tuesday that if Donald Trump gets the Republican nomination and Hillary Clinton is the Democratic standard-bearer, then “crazy loses to dishonest” in the public’s eye. There isn’t any real evidence that Hillary Clinton is personally dishonest in the way that Graham is charging. She’s just a politician.

But of course there is a lot of evidence that Donald Trump is unbalanced.

The problem is, Graham and many other members of the Republican Establishment are blind to the ways in which the Trump stances they call crazy are mostly simply explicit statements of what they say with dog-whistles. Or they employ the same rhetorical tricks but apply them to what Graham thinks are the wrong targets.

Graham complains that Trumps speaks in a bigoted way about Latinos, who he says are the fastest-growing part of the electorate. He is frustrated that Trump is chasing away a key demographic.

But Graham himself has called Middle Easterners all “crazy” and characterized Iranians as all “liars.” He made the latter slur in order to argue that diplomacy could not succeed in dealing with Iran. But the Iranians did concrete in their planned heavy water reactor and met every other obligation of the JCPOA agreement with the UN Security Council.

After the Dylann Roof shooting at Emanuel ME Church in Charleston, Graham opposed removing the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds, on the grounds that it represented ‘who we are.’ But 66% of SC African-Americans wanted it gone, and SC is the state with the largest proportion of African-Americans in the country (if they were actually enfranchised Graham wouldn’t be senator). .....................(more)

http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/dont-be-fooled-lindsey-graham-gop-establishment-just-as-crazy-as-trump.html

[Nyan]

1. Duh...

[BeyondGeography]

2. My promise to you...

[oberliner]

3. Has Juan Cole announced who he is endorsing?

I'm guessing Jill Stein.