Lindsey Graham played a cameo role before leaving this planet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8FgeJx_g6Y

Mitch McConnell's condition appears to be beyond hope.

But Dr. Donald Trump refuses to accept the diagnosis.

As the hospital staff watches in disbelief, he conducts his own examination, reaches a very different conclusion, and orders a treatment plan that only he could prescribe.

My latest AI Funny is a parody inspired by Awakenings. Thanks for supporting independent satire and making these daily shorts possible.

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

SEE ALSO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPeZx-kp1vE

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham said on a visit to Kyiv that the White House has agreed to support a revised bipartisan Russia sanctions bill, increasing the likelihood that the legislation will become law. Graham said the measure, developed with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, would provide President Donald Trump with additional tools to pressure Moscow and countries that continue purchasing Russian oil and gas. Speaking in the Ukrainian capital, Graham also welcomed plans to expand cooperation with Ukraine on Patriot air defence systems and said increased economic pressure and military support could strengthen efforts to bring the war to an end through diplomacy.

Lindsey Graham was a monster, but not exceptional

Normal people would be ashamed to be seen with him, dead or alive; Western elites are boasting of how close to him they were

Lindsey Graham is dead. And if we were to apply the old Spartan and then Roman adage “about the dead, nothing but the good,” then this is where this text would have to end. 

Some readers may find this shocking or unkind. But it is a fact that there is no way to write about the intriguingly sudden end of the long-term US senator from South Carolina in a ‘balanced’ manner and stay honest.

Graham was an almost cartoonishly evil man and since he was also very powerful, his moral depravity made a big difference to the lives of all too many. Downplaying that fact out of misplaced piety would be perverse; it would mean to disrespect the many victims of perfidious and brutal US and, in fact, Israeli policies of vicious violence and outrageous injustice that Graham promoted with every fiber of his being for his whole political life.

During the Gaza genocide, when challenged specifically about the Israeli mass killings of civilians, including women and children, Graham launched into what can only be called a psychopathic rant comparing the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians with American warfare against Germany in Japan in World War II (an intriguing comparison in and of itself, but that is another matter) and drawing the conclusion that Gaza should be flattened, including with nuclear weapons. Gaza has been flattened, and to his dying day, Graham never showed an ounce of compassion for those slaughtered by his Israeli friends and did everything he could to support that slaughter.

That is, of course, also why internationally wanted war criminal – really genocidaire – Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to offer his public condolences.

Speaking of Graham’s obvious subservience to Israel, the senator was, unsurprisingly, also a great fan of going to war with Iran, tirelessly calling for attacking it as violently as possible. He spread the Orwellian lies that Iran was about to pose a nuclear threat to the US and that its ballistic missile arsenal was a tool of reckless aggression, all to produce domestic support for yet another criminal American war. Himself addicted to hiding his foul character behind a bigoted and utterly fake Christian piety, Graham compared Iran’s leaders to Hitler and called them “religious Nazis,” thereby not merely offending brave men towering above him in moral and intellectual terms, but also helping to drum up propaganda for murdering them.  

It is an irony of history or, maybe, divine justice that he lived just long enough to see the US follow his insane and corrupt advice and suffer a geopolitically catastrophic defeat for it. 

Yet Graham was a monster long before the Gaza Genocide and the US-Israeli war against Iran. He was obsessed with brutalizing as many other countries and societies as possible. He could not see an opportunity for a war and not do his worst to make it happen. Graham’s record of warmongering is so extensive that it is hard to reproduce it in its entirety. Just shortly before his end, he had been calling for more US violence in Cuba, Lebanon, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Yemen – apart, obviously, from his eternal compulsion to scream for, in effect, more dead Palestinians and Iranians.

In true American fashion, if being Graham’s target was terrible, being his ‘friend’ was no better. Ukraine has come to stand for that experience. Even while pretending to be its ardent supporter, Graham was always among those most brutally open about using Ukraine and its people for the geopolitical and commercial interests of the US. He praised opportunities to rob Ukraine of crucial raw materials and he clearly considered pumping money into its ultra-corrupt Zelensky regime a great deal as it produced dead Russians (and, he failed to mention, Ukrainians, too, of course). 

There is no other way of putting it. Lindsey Graham was an infernally bad man. And he was a revolting man: his viciousness was glaringly obvious. Graham was not a complicated case, a conflicted character, a man of light and dark. He was among the closest to pure, unadulterated, and shamelessly brazen evil many of us will ever lay eyes on. 

That is why it is telling – but not surprising – to see who is lining up to let us know how much they’ll miss him, that they were buddies with him, or what a wonderful person he was. Apart from Netanyahu, for instance, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO’s Trump bellboy Mark Rutte, Ukraine’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Zelensky, and, of course, AIPAC.

What these often abject condolences show is not merely the moral failure – polite term – of those who offer them. There is a more general and, in its way, worse point: Horrible as Graham was, he was also representative of the elites of the US and the West. Normal people would be ashamed to be seen with Graham, dead or alive; Western elites are boasting of their intimacy with him. 

Graham was explicit in displaying his genuine, sick joy in inflicting pain and misery on as much of the world as he could. Indeed, one way to describe him would be as an openly, enthusiastically sadistic imperialist. Graham was a depraved pervert of power who let it all hang out. But apart from his lack of filter, he was not an exception but typical. 

Graham was the ugly and all too realistic face of much of the West and its leaders in Washington. He is gone, everyone and everything else is still in place. 

https://www.rt.com/news/642923-lindsey-graham-was-monster/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

Trump, Democrats, media mourn right-wing warmonger Lindsey Graham

Patrick Martin

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly Saturday at the age of 71, was a right-wing war hawk who was a vocal advocate of American imperialist aggression from Afghanistan and Iraq to Ukraine and Iran. His death came less than 24 hours after a long plane flight from the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Graham’s strident advocacy of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine accounts in part for the adulatory tone of the media coverage of his death and the effusive remarks of Democratic senators and congressmen. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal urged the Senate to pass the bipartisan sanctions bill against Russia which he and Graham co-sponsored, as a tribute to the late four-term senator from South Carolina.

There was virtually no acknowledgement in the media coverage of Graham’s role as the successor in the Senate to Strom Thurmond, the Democrat turned Republican who built his political career on the defense of Jim Crow segregation. Graham did not come of age until after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s, but he worked closely with Thurmond after he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1994. When Thurmond retired in 2003, at the age of 100, Graham positioned himself in the Republican primary as Thurmond’s logical successor and won easily. He never criticized, let alone repudiated, Thurmond’s long history of race-baiting and support for the Ku Klux Klan.

While in the House, Graham’s best-known action was to serve as one of the House impeachment managers in the trial of President Bill Clinton before the US Senate. His denunciations of Clinton for lying about a private sexual affair contrast sharply with his later defense of the world-class liar and serial abuser of women who now occupies the White House.

In domestic policy, Graham stood out mainly for his longevity, rising to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was a pivotal defender of all three Trump nominees to the Supreme Court: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. As chairman, he pushed through the confirmation of Coney Barrett weeks before the 2020 election.

In 2025, Graham became chair of the Senate Budget Committee and played the main role in pushing through what Trump called his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a massive tax cut for the wealthy which slashed $1 trillion over ten years from Medicaid and nearly $200 billion from food stamps. Among the states hardest-hit by these cuts is South Carolina, one of the poorest states, mired in political and social backwardness.

But Graham’s main political role was as an incessant advocate of imperialist war. He formed a partnership with Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, traveling the world as the “Three Amigos” to bolster US military allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Pakistan and Colombia. He was ready to praise any bloodstained dictatorship as a thriving democracy, so long as it was allied to Washington.

While his career in Congress began after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a vitriolic anticommunism was the basis of his foreign policy orientation, which transmuted into hostility to Russia and China. He was commissioned as an Air Force judge advocate (military lawyer) in 1982, at the height of the Cold War, serving 33 years in the Air Force and its reserve components, including reserve duty stints in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While intransigent towards the perceived enemies of American capitalism overseas, Graham was nothing if not flexible in his approach to the fascist enemies of American democracy at home, in particular Donald Trump. 

Graham launched a presidential campaign in June 2015 but ended it in December of that year without having gained any significant support, going on to endorse first Jeb Bush and then Ted Cruz. But he was then a sharp-tongued critic of Trump, calling him, accurately enough, a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

Trump responded in kind, at one point reading out Graham’s private cellphone number at a campaign rally so that his supporters could call the senator and vilify him. In one television interview, Graham said: “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” He said flatly that Trump was unqualified to be president and voted in 2016 for third-party candidate Evan McMullin, a conservative Republican.

Once Trump entered the White House, however, Graham switched his posture almost overnight, becoming an assiduous flatterer of the new president, a legislative ally, frequent visitor to the White House and Mar-a-Lago, and an almost weekly golfing partner.

Graham fully supported Trump’s refusal to admit his loss of the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, and he directly assisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote. He called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, suggesting that he reject mail-in votes from certain counties with “questionable” signatures. He was recommended for indictment by the special grand jury, but District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, declined to charge him. The broader prosecution later collapsed when a state appeals court removed Willis and her Republican-appointed successor dropped all charges in November 2025.

After the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Graham pretended to break with Trump, declaring, “Count me out. Enough is enough.” But he voted against convicting Trump after he was impeached by the House for instigating the attack, and later said, “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.” When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Graham resumed his role as one of the most disgusting courtiers of the would-be dictator-president.

Commentary on the Sunday morning television talk shows treated Graham as a political giant and an intransigent defender of freedom and democracy. After Trump phoned in to several of the talk shows to pay tribute to Graham, Democrats like Senator Adam Schiff and former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile chimed in with their own praise.

Both former president Biden and former vice president Kamala Harris issued their own tributes.

Biden’s statement said, “Lindsey and I served together in Congress for over a decade, and worked closely on many issues throughout the years. We traveled the world together as members of the Senate Foreign Relations committee. We disagreed often, and sometimes loudly [but] Lindsey and I did agree on the profound importance of public service. Like me, he loved the Senate as an institution, even with all its flaws and complexities.”

Harris wrote on social media, “I am saddened to learn of the passing of my former colleague, Senator Lindsey Graham. He was full of wit, energy, and charm, and he cared deeply about the Senate and the people of South Carolina. Doug and I are sending our thoughts and our prayers to his friends and loved ones.”

Biden and Harris, and their Democratic colleagues in Congress, praise this political hack who was a relentless advocate of US military aggression, and who deliberately aligned himself with the fascist president once he saw which way the wind was blowing in the Republican Party. 

That only demonstrates that there is no fundamental difference between the two capitalist parties, that, as President Obama declared after Trump’s victory in 2016, the election was an “intramural scrimmage” between two sides that are on the same team—the team of American capitalism, of the billionaires and the military-intelligence apparatus.

The adulation in official Washington stands in stark contrast to the response among the broader public, where the news of Graham’s death has been met with a mixture of indifference and open hostility. On social media, most of the commentary centered on the wars Graham championed and the millions of lives they destroyed. Among some, there may be a sentiment that Saturday’s sudden events will improve the state of American politics, if only slightly.

This, however, would be to vastly overstate Graham’s individual significance. The oligarchy that elevated him can easily replace him with another reactionary nonentity. What his career demonstrates is not the power of one man but the character of the political system that produced him, one in which decades of service to militarism and reaction are the qualification for the tributes now being showered upon him by both capitalist parties.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/13/ntqw-j13.html

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuNKIwzjga8

Lindsey knew better. He chose worse.

STEVE SCHMIDT

Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention. 

Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it.

I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.

We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.

Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.

Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.

When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.

Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.

He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made.

He chose Trump over his friend.

He chose Trump over his country.

He chose Trump over his duty.

He chose Trump over his oath.

Now he’s dead, and Trump is his rotten legacy — and in that, he won’t be alone.

In the end he made an adjudicated rapist laugh and played a lot of golf with him.

He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.

Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.

He was no patriot.

Lindsey Graham made his choice.

The high court of history will pass a brutal judgement about a man who knew better, but chose worse.

I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.

He was a most contemptible man.

https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/lindsey-knew-better-he-chose-worse

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuNKIwzjga8

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrZBwcVZb84

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH-yAy8_yB4

SEE ALSO: https://www.advocate.com/voices/2022/9/25/never-seen-vagina-lindsey-grahams-sexuality-joke

Sorry, conspiracy theorists, Lindsey Graham isn’t worth your effort

Unlike the late senator, the war machine is immortal and can easily afford to lose one of its main mascots

Some guys die falling down the stairs while putting their pants on. Lindsey Graham went out much more boringly. Sorry to disappoint.

His demise is a tale as old as time. A guy with a medically-documented bad ticker has a jammer at home around the same age as his own father did. Pretty straightforward. And boring. Far too pedestrian, apparently, for some folks. Already, there seems to be an overlap between the people who imagine penises on women like Michelle Obama and Brigitte Macron, and those who fancy Graham’s death being the direct result of a foreign adversary getting their own rocks off. These people need to log off from their online insane asylum and touch grass.

Graham had just returned from Ukraine where he toured a weapons factory. So naturally some of these folks think that Putin had him knocked off. Except that he died at home on the other side of the world. So how does that square with a hit job? Easy, apparently. Because the poison used was time-released. Ah, yes – of course. Or maybe Putin bombed him in Ukraine but his pals conspired to weekend-at-Bernie’s him all the way back home to DC to help Putin out with a bit of crisis management.

It’s much less dramatic to admit that Graham was just a guy who died doing what he loved most – and spent the most time doing. That is, thinking up ways for the US to perversely inflict pain on other nations for refusing to bend over on command. Personally, I like swimming. A lot. If I dropped dead in a pool someday, no one would be surprised. If someone spends tons of time in front of the TV, their odds of dying there increase. So the fact that a warmonger dropped dead right after wrapping up his latest warmongering tour is par for the course.

But it’s so difficult for some folks to accept this straightforwardness. Because they imagine that there are so many people in the countries that Graham warmongered against who would have wanted him dead. Neocons who loved Graham think that’s the case. So do those who loathed him for the same reasons and say that they’re glad he was “taken out.”

They’re bigging him up far too much. He really isn’t worthy of any of these theories. Did it ever occur to them that he was seen by his targets as a circus clown more than anything else? “But Israel killed him to keep the war in Iran going!” they say. As if Trump needs anyone else for that, now that he’s locked into a sword-measuring contest with the Iranians.

Oh, but Graham had Trump’s ear! He was pushing Trump to blow more American cash on weapons “for Ukraine”! Yeah, yeah – and surely now that he’s gone, it’ll all come to a crashing halt, right? Trump’s two sons who are overtly raking in Pentagon cash for Ukrainian drone investments will just demand that their father bail on the whole thing now that Lindsey Graham is gone.

If offing people responsible for driving the current iteration of the American war machine was an actual solution for achieving peace, starting with Lindsey Graham is like offing Cookie Monster in an attempt to bring down the Sesame Street franchise: “Some people say me want too many cookies. Wrong. Me want the cookies necessary to ensure cookie dominance for generations…. Critics ask, ‘How many cookies does Cookie Monster need?’ Me ask, ‘How many cookies are our enemies hiding?’”

The clown simply goes off to the big cosmic tent – and nothing much changes. Graham was merely a cast member of America Inc., which has no shortage of understudies.

Let me make it emphatically clear that speaking ill of the dead isn’t my thing. What’s even the point? It’s not like karma needs help with the heavy lifting after it’s already dropped the anvil on someone. No need for anyone to subsequently pile on with a folding chair. But any fitting celebration of life involves reminiscing about that life. And when that life constantly involves promoting war, there’s not much wiggle room.

His defenders have now taken to pointing out that he was actually a stellar guy because he died with a net worth suggesting that he wasn’t on the take from the defense contractors for whom he permanently served as a lobbyist. “The senator died with a net worth of about $1.4 million, with congressional disclosures from May showing a lower-end estimate of just over $600,000 and an upper estimate of a little more than $2.2 million,” wrote the grotesquely neocon media outlet Fox News.

Even taking that claim at face value, does this mean that the moral high-bar now is being so genuinely obsessed with war and weapons that you champion them strictly from your soul without financial incentive? How does this not make it even worse? Seems like at least cash-for-war would be a less disgusting motive than simply getting your jollies from peddling tools of death and destruction.

“I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization,” Graham apparently told someone close to him shortly before packing it in permanently, according to Fox News. Turns out that karma’s ultimate regime change got to him first.

So US Senator Lindsey Graham can now be referred to permanently in the past tense. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for all his pet causes which continue to plague the planet. Because the war machine is immortal. It can easily afford to lose any single mascot and just keep on billing.

https://www.rt.com/news/643036-lindsey-graham-conspiracy-theories/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….