Death, Lindsey Graham, USPOL
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Lindsey Graham is dead and the "don't speak ill of the dead" replies are already rolling in, so let's jump into that shit first.
That saying is about 2,600 years old. Chilon of Sparta allegedly said it around 600 BC, written down centuries later by Diogenes Laertius, and Renaissance scholars spread the Latin version everywhere: "de mortuis nil nisi bonum." The Greeks had legitimate societal reasons for it. You owed the dead their funeral rites, attacking a guy who can't answer was cowardly, and shit-talking the dead usually meant you were really attacking their family directly, which is how blood feuds got started that could last decades or longer. No bueno for keeping the peace, especially if there were a lot of assholes around (like there always seem to be, especially in politics).
So the rule was about intentionally avoiding starting fights with grieving families. It was never about protecting a dead politician/asshole's reputation from their own record. People wave it around now to shut down honest assessment at the exact moment the legacy gets written, and funny how it only ever comes out for the powerful. Nobody says it when a nobody dies. It's whitewashing the powerful while shutting up the folks that powerful person shit on. Fuck that.
Graham's record doesn't need any exaggeration, it just needs to be read out loud.
He never met a war he didn't like. Iraq for twenty years. Libya. All of it. Other people's kids went, he sucked up to higher-up assholes who would do him favors.
In 2015 he called Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" and said if the GOP nominated him, "we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it." Then he spent ten years as the man's golf buddy, personal asshole licker, and most reliable vote for whatever dehumanizing garbage Trump wanted in the Senate.
In 2016 he said, on camera: "I want you to use my words against me. If there's a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination." Then he chaired the committee that jammed Amy Coney Barrett through eight days before the 2020 election. The press - everyone used his words against him. He laughed.
After that election, this pigfucker (no offense to pigs) personally called Georgia's Secretary of State asking, per the secretary's own account, whether he could toss legally cast mail ballots, you know, for funsies. He fought the Fulton County subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court and lost.
He died Saturday night of an aortic dissection. Good. And you know what? His death doesn't undo one line of any of that. The dead don't care what we say about them. The people who lived with the consequences of his choices, who know people who were killed by this man's decisions in life directly or indirectly, are all still alive, and every sanitized eulogy on cable news this week is spitting in their faces. Including Biden's praising of this worthless sack of shit.
The part of the old saying worth keeping is small: don't torment the grieving at the funeral, and get your facts straight because the dead can't correct you. Done and done. The rest is grade school peer pressure bullshit without an understanding of a saying that came from civilizations long since gone, mistranslated to give assholes a pass in death for everything they did in life.
My father and I got to read about a guy who was abusive towards me when I was in my teens, who I was in business with, who killed himself after several lawsuits aimed at him exceeding $3M for money he stole from his partners. When I was 18, I told my dad, "I don't want to speak ill of the dead", thinking it was just a normal thing. My father replied, "No. He was a piece of shit in life, he was a piece of shit in death. He doesn't get a pass on how he treated me or you now that he's gone. His grave isn't even worth pissing on."
My father also told me that when he died, he hopes I'd learn from the things he did wrong, and know that he at least tried. But not to ever remember him as a saint. And I'm honoring his wishes. He wasn't a saint, but on the whole, he was a damned good guy. Every day I try to learn from the ways that he failed, but I can't do that without acknowledging that there were ways that he failed. Ones even he acknowledged, and some he didn't.
If I'm going to remember my father as an imperfect person who tried, I sure as hell will remember Graham as a piece of shit who didn't.
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