It’s no secret that U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham is sex nuts for the Benghazi investigation. It’s no secret he’d like to make hot, sweaty hate to it all night long and stuff its face with ham biscuits in the morning and make hate all over again. He loves his ham biscuits and he loves, loves, loves Benghazi.

In fact, there’s probably not a day that goes by that Graham doesn’t get down on his hooves and knees and thank the great Political Consultant in the Sky for the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2012, a tragedy which claimed the lives of four Americans and gave Mr. Grahmnesty a way to appeal to the red meat South Carolinians who’d turned against him. 

Well, Graham’s need to fetishize Benghazi reached its apex yesterday when he released the following tweet: “It started with Benghazi. When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression. #Ukraine.”

Not surprisingly, the Twitterati shat themselves when they read that, and pundits on both the Left and Right salivated at the chance to whip Graham’s bare backside. After all, Benghazi and the crisis in the Ukraine have nothing in common, right?

Wrong. They do.

But Graham is wrong when he says that it was Obama’s inability to avenge the deaths of those four Americans on Sept. 11, 2012 which has given Russian President Vladimir Voldemort the courage to begin looking for a little Black Sea “lebensraum.” Nope. Vlad the Bad was empowered by the U.S.’s entire post-9/11 shock-and-awe, government-flipping Middle Eastern campaign, not just one little component of it 

After all, many of the same arguments that Putin now uses to justify military action in the Ukraine are no different than the arguments the U.S. used to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq — we must take military action to protect ourselves from an imminent danger that poses no imminent danger to our nation and to bring stability to this otherwise unstable area so that our people can sleep better at night knowing that we can still kick somebody’s ass. And if that means we have to occupy a troublesome little nation for the next 100 years and fill the coffers of our military-industrial friends, then so be it. We’re just protecting our own interests. And you can’t argue with that. And at least in Russia’s defense, they actually share a border with the Ukraine. 

So scoff at Lindsey all you like. He’s kinda right. But thanks to armchair war mongers like him, the U.S. is now in the middle of the most dangerous stalemate it has faced since the waning days of the Cold War. Thanks, assholes. The law of unintended consequences is a bitch.

Help keep the City Paper free.

No paywalls.
No newspaper subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations from downtown to North Charleston to Johns Island to Summerville to Mount Pleasant.

Help support independent journalism by donating today.