“Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina and a onetime opponent turned stalwart ally of President Trump who was a forceful advocate for an interventionist U.S. foreign policy, died on Saturday evening.” — New York Times
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, so what I’ll say about our recently departed senator is that he made a mean mint julep. We used to sip them together on the veranda of his South Carolina home, a Democrat and a Republican, side by side in a show of bipartisanship that exemplified what made this country great for those of us in the ruling class.
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, so I’ll tell you my favorite thing about the senator: his quick wit and sense of humor. The way he voted for cuts to both the ACA and Medicaid and then claimed he’d done no such thing had me in stitches! But at the end of the day, when we were both relaxing on rafts in the infinity pool at the Senate gym and trading recommendations for cardiologists on our top-notch, low-cost congressional health plan, I realized we had more in common with each other than either of us did with the American people.
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, and I don’t have to. Because even though the senator played an extremely active role in dismantling our democracy—blocking my party from the Supreme Court appointment we should have had in 2016 and lobbying hard to disenfranchise Georgia voters in the 2020 election—he was an absolute delight to be around. He lit up a room the way Debby Boone lit up our lives back in the 1970s.
I would never speak ill of the dead, especially a man I considered a friend. My fondest memory of the senator is how he always had a twinkle in his eye when voting to take away the reproductive rights of my fellow American women.
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, and so I’ll tell you a story about the senator. Remember how in 2015 he called Donald Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot,” urged his party to tell Trump to “go to hell,” then did a total one-eighty after Trump was elected? All you plebes think it was about kompromat, but really, like most things in Washington, it was just about money.
I’m not speaking ill of the dead when I say that the senator was like an unguided missile. You never knew where he would land or who or what might be destroyed in his wake, but gosh darnit, he sure created a lot of light as he helped to decimate huge swaths of the Middle East in search of weapons of mass destruction that never existed.
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, so I think it’s important to put the senator’s passionate defense of Brett Kavanaugh in context: Both men came from a different time—a time when the concept of consent wasn’t even a glimmer in a preppy douchebag’s eye.
I would never speak ill of the dead, so I’ll praise the senator as a foreign policy giant who was kind, gracious, and thoughtful, particularly to lobbyists. As a Democrat in name only, I have nothing but admiration for the way he used the American people as pawns to gain political power and further his own agenda. And soon, I’ll be switching parties to pick up where this great man left off.
