Everything voters have come to despise about the GOP Establishment is incarnated in Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who grudgingly allowed that Republican maharajahs might just have to hold their noses and support that Ted Cruz fellow… just a couple of weeks after Graham joked that he could get away with murdering Cruz on the Senate floor.
“You know Ted Cruz is not my favorite, by any means, and I don’t wish him ill – I was making a joke about Ted – but we may be in a position where we have to rally around Ted Cruz as the only way to stop Donald Trump, and I’m not so sure that would work.” said Graham on Super Tuesday, in an interview with CBS News.
In the same interview, Graham dismissed Donald Trump as “crazy”… and then claimed Hispanic voters are “clamoring to be Republicans, but we just won’t let them.” Mind your own Rorschach inkblots before you go calling anyone else crazy, Senator Graham.
As for the joke where Graham supposedly didn’t wish Ted Cruz any ill, Graham dropped that little barrel of chuckles at the Washington Press Club’s Congressional Dinner on February 25.
He once again asserted that his entire party had gone “crazy,” which is just what Party voters want to hear from an elder statesman going into a historic election, and then said of Cruz’s unpopularity with his colleagues: “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”
You’re not likely to hear any senior members of the Senate Democratic Caucus insulting their own party as a band of lunatics or joking about how Hillary Clinton is so unpopular that she could be killed without consequence.
Graham is a glittering example of the very same “loser” mentality Trump attacks so effectively. He’s also the kind of reptilian opportunist that would set aside all those phony-macho professions of contempt for Cruz to admit he might just be the only effective candidate against Trump… and then, in the very same breath, admit he doubts it would work anyway. How inspiring! With “friends” like Lindsay Graham, who needs enemies?
Incidentally, some of Graham’s colleagues are sticking with their earlier decision that Cruz is the worst of two evils, but they can make their peace with President Trump. Politico reported on Wednesday morning that “several Republican lawmakers have told lobbyists and donors that a Trump ticket would boost turnout and that it would be easier to create distance from Trump on policy than from Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas or Marco Rubio of Florida.”
One unnamed senator told Politico that Trump’s ability to bring new voters into the GOP fold should not be underestimated, while Cruz’s fellow Texan, Senator John Cornyn, ventured that Trump could beat Clinton because “she’s such a damaged candidate in her own right.”
In other words, Trump will hammer Clinton’s weaknesses with the gusto many Republican leaders reserve for upstart members of their own party.