Weekend Read

     I admit it: I underestimated U. S. Senator Lindsey Graham.  I took him for an earnest striver, a perpetual "B" student struggling to keep up with the cool kids, always a few steps behind and short of breath.  I was wrong.  To his credit, his academic credentials are solid and he's put in years of good work as an Air Force lawyer.  On the other side of the ledger, he's got piles of the kind of ambition that Senators are made of, and he is more than willing to strain at gnats while swallowing camels whole in pursuit of partisan politics.

     A man like that can be made -- or unmade -- by circumstances, and Senator Graham managed to be right there in the fray as Donald J. Trump entered Republican politics and made it -- and, eventually, the Senator -- his own.

     Will Saletan of The Bulwark has done a deep, deep dive into Lindsey Graham's political arc, following him step by step from 2105 to the present and it's sobering reading.

     One vital takeaway: Trumpism is not conservatism. It's authoritarianism.  Mr. Trump's fans at home and abroad like to paint all of his critics as "liberals," usually with a touch of insulting embroidery around the edges.*  The Bulwark is quite emphatically not a liberal website; the staff consists of conservatives, neo-cons, non-Trump Republicans and an occasional libertarian-leaning type, and you'll sniff about in vain for a whiff of New Deal/Great Society/Clintonian/Obamaesque folks there.
___________________________
* Hoping, I suppose, for a steam-out-the-ears reaction, which they're not going to get from me.  I'm an old-fashioned libertarian: while I'm perfectly happy if gun-toting drag queens get married and smoke pot, if knuckle-dragging Neanderthals stand up a stone circle and howl away at the solstice or if  Joe Sixpack and family enjoy an ordinary church-on-Sunday life in the suburbs, and so on, I don't think it should be state-subsidized. If that happens to make steam come out of your ears, well, it's a free country -- steam away!