Following President Donald Trump’s abruptly ordered airstrike killing top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, many people have expressed concern about what kind of conflict that the president has recklessly dragged the United States into, while figures like Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have fallen in line as part of the Trump personality cult, no matter the cost in lives. This weekend in an appearance on Fox News, Graham proudly threatened the lives of Iranian civilians, pettily called a Trump critic a “loser” and “racist,” and even complained about prominent progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in a scorched earth interview in which he went all out for Trump’s desperate bloodlust.
Following the strike on Soleimani, Iranians have pledged harsh retaliation against the U.S., while the Trump administration has urged all Americans to leave Iraq, thousands more troops have been slated to be deployed to the region, and the Department of Homeland Security has even begun preparing for potential serious retaliatory cyberattacks from Iranians — but Graham completely ignored all of these developments with the brazen lie that the U.S. is in the clear.
He insisted:
‘Well President Trump has really changed the equation here. For the first time in my life time the Iranians are worried about the Americans. It used to be that we were worried about the Iranians exclusively. Now, I think, they don’t know what to do with Donald Trump… The maximum pressure campaign against Iran is working. Their economy is in the toilet… If the Iranians hit American targets and American interests and American allies, we will respond militarily. If they hit us again, then I would not want to be working at an Iranian oil field.’
To be clear — that’s a top Republican blatantly threatening the lives of Iranian civilians if their leaders dare to respond to a military strike on a top political and military leader that may or may not have even been based on actual compelling evidence of an imminent attack that needed to be thwarted. According to New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi, high-level sources call the evidence “razor thin” that an imminent attack was actually looming that warranted the Soleimani strike.
1. I’ve had a chance to check in with sources, including two US officials who had intelligence briefings after the strike on Suleimani. Here is what I’ve learned. According to them, the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is “razor thin”.
— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) January 4, 2020
That didn’t stop Graham from continuing his outrageous Fox News victory lap. He went on from the above to nauseatingly call Colin Kaepernick a “loser” for daring to point out that yet again, Republicans like Graham himself are wantonly threatening the lives of non-white people.
He rambled:
‘He’s a loser on and off the field. He has no idea what the Iranian regime has done to the region, he has no idea that they have 600 American deaths as a result of IEDs made in Iran and used in Iraq. It’s un-American. He’s a racist. If you’re looking for for racism in America, Mr. Kaepernick, look in the mirror. Your country is not the problem! It’s the Iranian and you’re so blinded by your hatred of Trump that you can’t see the difference between who we are and who the Ayatollah is.’
No, just no. His opposition to war doesn’t make him some kind of racist against white people.
And the only two options here are not blind support for bloodshed and love for terrorists — but Graham went on. He spouted that Ocasio-Cortez supposedly “doesn’t know anything about the law of armed conflict, obviously” — but his claim that she’s wrong about the need to consult Congress because troops were in immediate danger rests only on that “razor thin” evidence.
Watch:
