Why Make Sense?

      My link to Will Saletan's lengthy examination of U. S. Senator Lindsay Graham and his evolving relationship with former President Donald Trump has resulted in a couple of critical comments.

      One wonders about the piece, "...reading like an autobiography," questioning how Saletan can possibly know so much about the Senator's opinions.  The answer -- as pointed out in the text -- is that Graham is a tireless promoter, who is happy to work the political talk shows and make public appearances.  He's as close to an open book as you'll find in modern politics.  The man rarely shuts up.  It's what made him such an illustrative subject.

      Another condemns any praise of Graham as shameful, calling him a "RINO [expletive]."  I'm not sure what praise the commenter finds objectionable.  When I looked up the Senator's Wikipedia biography, it was obvious he'd been a hard worker in the Navy's legal department and I made a point of mentioning it; Will Saletan speaks highly of Graham's initial criticism of Mr. Trump.  In a remarkable example of the problem with organizing a political party or movement around a person instead of principles, today's GOP defines a "RINO" as any Republican insufficiently supportive of the former President.  This hardly describes Lindsay Graham's current publicly stated opinion; he's MAGA all the way.  It goes to show the brittle nature of such an arrangement: any politician without a sensitive finger to shifts in the Trumpian wind may find themselves out in the cold.

      Maybe that was okay for Stalin or Mao or the court of Louis XVI of France, but it's not the way we've done things in this country.  The GOP once had a large enough tent that there was room within it for Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, and the Democrats across the aisle frequently demonstrate a degree of internal disagreement that borders on chaos.  All of 'em in both parties nevertheless used to operate with a bedrock faith and credence in the basic institutions of our government, no matter how much they disagreed among or between one another, no matter how heated debate became.

      It's not like that any more, and one side is a lot more screwed-up than the other.