as God is my witness, I'll never vote conservative again....(oh my, I'm getting the vapors!!)
Posted on 07/01/2010 10:06:26 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Lindsey Graham was sitting in a sedan early one morning and contentedly discussing the various fellow South Carolina conservatives who dislike him — Tea Partiers, Constitutionalists, immigration hardliners — when Van Cato, his upstate regional director, lifted a hand from the steering wheel and said: “That’s the leader of them right there. There’s his sign. He’s running for Greenville County Council.”
“Harry Kibler,” Graham, the state’s senior U.S. senator, murmured as he read the campaign poster.
“He’s the one that has that prop of your legs sticking out of a toilet in the back of his truck,” Cato added helpfully.
Graham turned away from the window. A large red flea bite, acquired during a recent trip to Afghanistan, sat aglow just to the right of his nose. “Is he running as a Republican?” he asked. Cato affirmed that Kibler was.
“Who’s running against him?” Graham asked.
“Fred Payne. He’s the incumbent.”
“O.K. Tell Fred, anything I can do, I’ll do.”
Graham is not a morning person, but at that hour in May he was thoroughly revved up, despite eating only a pack of crackers for breakfast. (Graham does not cook; it is widely believed by those close to him that he is incapable of manipulating a coffee machine, an oven, a toaster or a can opener.) Big issues rattle from his brain and out of his inert, somewhat glassy-eyed face as if dispensed by a gum-ball machine. Among these was the Kerry-Lieberman climate-change bill — or “energy independence” bill, as he preferred to call it for the sake of attracting conservative support. (“To me, it is about jobs, not polar bears!”)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Just given the Slimes wrote it speaks volumes.
The South is falling down at the very time we need to pick up the Standard and take the hill!
Do you think these two ever talk? Graham is a Southern embarrassment.
Graham is what’s wrong with Washington.
They’re sucking up to him (no pun intended) at the same time Obama is making his big “immigration speech”.
Coincidence? I think not.
What we need are more “mavericks” in the Democrat Party, take this any way you want.
as God is my witness, I'll never vote conservative again....(oh my, I'm getting the vapors!!)
I do agree with one thing Graham said...
“Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today.”
All too true... the GOP becoming a pale shadow of its former self.. Reagan would be a proud Tea Party candidate!
Well, see where being a maverick got John McCain...you would think Lindsey Graham would have learned something from that but NO....
I think the title meant to say “Mrs. Maverick”.
So a Republican makes fun of him, so he supports the Democrat, without even finding out a blessed thing about who the Democrat is. That’s not a “maverick.” That’s someone who badly suffers from pathological narcissism.
NYT getting ahead of the curve for the 2012 elections.
Translation: “The Bamster is worse than anyone imagined, and the Republicans will likely win big, not just in 2010 mid-terms, but in 2012 too. Which Repub can we prop up between now and then that would be closest to getting a Dem elected?”
Lindsey Graham is perverse. I am not referring to the reports suggesting that he is homosexual. I think that he is perverse because he seems to enjoy taking positions that are directly opposed to his Party. McCain is the same way and it is no surprise to me that they have been partnered up for years.
Neither one of them deserves to be in office. I will never understand why the people of South Carolina reelected Graham after he told LaRaza that Americans who opposed amnesty for millions of illegal aliens were bigots. How could they have voted again for this guy?
In a previous conversation, Graham told me: “The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out.”
(snip)
The White House logs do not record visits paid by U.S. senators. According to his office’s records, however, Lindsey Graham has been to the West Wing 19 times since Barack Obama became president. When I asked the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, if any other Republican senator was so frequent a guest, he thought for a moment before responding, rather doubtfully, “Maybe Susan Collins.”
(snip)
I observed that if this conversation about how to resolve tough issues were taking place in 2006, I would likely be having it not with Graham but with his friend and legislative mentor, John McCain. “Totally agree,” he responded. “I mean, I was the wingman, O.K.?” But, he acknowledged, things are different now: “John’s got a primary. He’s got to focus on getting re-elected. I don’t want my friend to get beat.”
I asked whether he was giving McCain a pass on anything risky this year.
“Yeah,” he said. Graham added that he was thinking about a question I recently asked him: would he be so out there, in a bipartisan way, if he were facing re-election this year rather than four years from now? “The answer’s probably no.” Then, as a point of pride, Graham could not resist observing that he had remained committed to immigration reform, which would include some form of a path to citizenship for those illegally in the country, during his previous (admittedly easy) re-election quest. “So I can go to these guys” — meaning, Republicans up for re-election this year — “and say: ‘Listen, I know you’re in the cycle, but so was I. I’m still here.’ ”
McCain was one of “these guys” who was ignoring Graham’s advice. Though Graham did not explicitly say so, he clearly seemed disappointed in his friend’s election-year drift to the right. He did, however, point out a bright side: McCain’s protégé now had an opportunity to show off his own legislative chops. And when it came to shaping the debate, Graham said: “I think I do that better than John. You know, he’s always been a romantic. He’s got to be fighting the bad guys. I’ve never been a Luke Skywalker. I’m a much more calculating guy than that. I understand that you just don’t charge into these things based on some moral belief that you’re right and the other guy’s wrong. I believe that you lay the groundwork before you get involved in these fights.”
(snip)
Whenever Graham speaks fondly of other legislators, Ted Kennedy’s name invariably comes up. He admired the Massachusetts senator’s energy and passion, but above all his practicality.
(snip)
“If you look at the Republicans who are likely to come into the Senate in 2010,” he said during our last meeting, “they’re gonna be more like me, not less like me.”
Catching himself, he added with a toothy grin, “Now, this lady from Nevada?” — referring to Sharron Angle, the Tea Party’s Republican favorite who will face Harry Reid in November. “Probably not.”
(snip)
I’m speechless.
McCain has to go, or else the RINOs will be out in full force, and it will be the end of the Tea Party movement.
I’m with you all the way.
Best to live in reality because it's looking more and more likely that McCain is not going anywhere except to his fourth term in the US Senate and the Tea Party Movement will not dispense because of McCain. You might think the race in Arizona is the be all, end all, but it isn't. The Tea Party Movement encompasses races at every level.
As for Mrs. McCain, he's the more troublesome because he relishes his role as the WH's "go to guy" on the Republican side of the aisle, whereas McCain is still smartin' from Obama's various public smack down's along with the loss of the presidency itself and the Marxist's mishandling of the war in Afghanistan and DADT. IOW, it's personal between Obama and McCain.
From the article:
Since his first Congressional race in 1994, Graham has employed the services of the South Carolina political consultant Richard Quinn. Quinn’s surveys now find Graham’s approval rating among Republicans at 64, which is 13 points lower than South Carolina’s far more conservative junior senator, Jim DeMint, but still quite high given Graham’s periodic defections from the conservative movement. When Graham takes on an issue, his seemingly off-the-cuff musings reflect his knowledge of Quinn’s data.
I find this information very troubling. I would have guessed Lindsey's approval rating in South Carolina below 50 percent!
Soon to be Governor Nikki Haley can inflict a lot of damage on Senator Graham, and as the article points out, she doesn't like him at all:
The South Carolina chapter of Resist.net warns constituents that Graham “is up to his old reach-across-the-aisle tricks again!” Among the conservative activists who have called for censuring Graham as a quisling of the right is the state’s G.O.P. gubernatorial nominee and Tea Party favorite, Nikki Haley.
Unfortunately, he'll be in office until 2014.
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