At some point it will become a problem for Republicans that their leading foreign policy voices are warmongers with terrible track records, but that time is not yet. Graham was recently lampooned, first at the National Interest magazine and later by The Daily Show for what can only be described as hysteria. Graham is either totally detached from reality or engaged in some sort of arch dada troll of the American people.
It was not true, contra Graham, that “chemical weapons in Syria today means nuclear weapons in the U.S. tomorrow” (September 2013). Nor is it true that if the president doesn’t do what Graham wants in Syria the consequence is “we all get killed back here at home” (September 2014). When they are not engaging in bizarre death fantasies, McCain and Graham are weasel-wording and using every extreme headline to justify spouting tendentious nonsense – such as a Washington Free Beacon piece that used official acknowledgement of things people were tweeting to blare that “U.S. Confirms ISIL Planning Infiltration of U.S. Southern Border” (later walked back, of course). McCain and Graham should realize their antics are ridiculous and do violence to the very idea of America as “home of the brave.”
There is one party in the United States that calls itself conservative. Its leading foreign policy lights, men like McCain and Graham, have an unerring track record of threat inflation, terrible decisions, and lying to explain them away. The substance of their views can be described in one word: revolutionary. In a country situated like the 2014 United States, conservatives should act and think like conservatives, not international revolutionaries.
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