Sen. Lindsey Graham isn't exactly my favorite Republican lawmaker. He's always been a little too squishy for me on a lot of issues, but when he decides to go to the mattresses with Democrats, it's kind of funny to see.
So, I take what he says with a grain of salt, and when he blames past presidents for an attack in Australia, you've gotta pause.
I mean, I get that American policies have ramifications for the rest of the world. That's going to happen when you're the only remaining superpower left on the planet. But Graham is saying that Presidents Obama and Biden are responsible for the Bondi Beach attack. That's so off base.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has claimed policies under former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama are partly to blame for the deadly mass shooting that took place at a Hanukkah event in Australia this weekend.
Graham, 70, joined Fox News Monday to express his outrage at the Bondi Beach shooting that left 15 people dead and dozens of others injured on the first night of Hanukkah.
Graham, a vocal ally of Israel, claimed the shooting proved the world is in a “religious war with radical Islam” after the Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese indicated the perpetrators appear to have been “motivated” by the terrorist organization, ISIS.
“Obama and Biden have a lot to do with this,” Graham declared on Hannity.
“I blame the terrorist, but Obama allowed ISIS to come about when he withdrew from Iraq… and the dumb*** Biden, the biggest dumb*** from the planet, withdrew from Afghanistan, obliterated our borders and rejoined the Iran nuclear agreement, making the Ayatollah flush with cash,” Graham added.
I mean, he's not entirely wrong there. The alleged attackers were reportedly affiliated with ISIS to some degree, and Obama's withdrawal from Iraq gave ISIS the go-ahead to gain in strength without American might to keep them in check. Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan was an absolute trainwreck, and his bending the knee to Iran sure didn't help, especially when all that money goes to fund terrorism throughout the world.
So while I disagree with Graham an awful lot, I don't know that he's wrong here. While we may disagree about whether we should have gotten involved in Iraq in the first place, I don't see a question about Afghanistan, and I also figure that if you're in a war, you fight to win. And I mean a complete victory, like what we had with Japan and Germany after World War II.
I'm not a war hawk. I believe we should be slow to anger in general, but if we reach that point, we should descend upon our enemies like the fiery hand of God and leave a scar in their cultural psyche that lasts for millennia about screwing with the United States. We didn't do that in either place, and look where we are now.
Obama and Biden pulled out when those conditions hadn't been met, did so badly, and here we are.
The truth is that Bondi is Islamic terrorism, and that was fueled by ISIS, either with training, funding, or just rhetoric. That's an organization that shouldn't exist, and those two presidents are at least partially responsible for it being what it is.
Graham wasn't out of line in placing at least some of the responsibility at those two men's feet.
Of course, most of the blame still must go to the killers. Those two disgusting excuses for human beings decided to kill as many people as they possibly could. They made that decision, and so the ultimate blame is on them.
But bad policies have worldwide ramifications, and Graham is right to call that out, even as most of us are focused elsewhere.
