Lindsey Graham, Party Hack Senator, Returns

Then Congressman Graham arguing the Clinton impeachment trial

Senator Lindsey Graham has been a partisan hack for as long as he's been in the national light. He rose to prominence in the 1990s as one of the House's prosecutors in the wasteful, failed President Clinton impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. He then became a U.S. Senator from South Carolina in 2002, the election where Republicans were lying to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Then he became John McCain's best buddy in arguing to bomb everyone. Now he's claiming a Republican-lead House Intelligence Committee report is garbage.

Yes, Lindsey Graham says the House Intelligence committee is wrong to say there is no scandal over Benghazi.

"I think the report is full of crap," Graham said on CNN's "State of the Union."

The senator insisted that members of the administration altered the Benghazi talking points after the attack.
"I'm saying that anybody who has followed Benghazi at all knows that the CIA deputy director did not come forward to tell Congress what role he played in changing the talking points," he said. "And the only way we knew he was involved is when he told a representative at the White House, I'm going to do a hard review of this, a hard rewrite."
CNN host Gloria Borger then told Graham that the House report concludes that the administration received bad information at first and did not lie.
"That's a bunch of garbage," Graham shot back. "That's a complete bunch of garbage."

Lindsey Graham is a partisan hack, and probably knows better than what he's saying, but knows it's good politics in a conservative state to say this. Let's review here- Benghazi is a terrible event, but people die at consulates in nations that are having a civil war, particularly in that region of the world, and they have died before. This happens in every Presidency. There was no cover-up, the President called it terrorism the next morning, and clearly it was a failure within the bureaucracy. The House Intelligence Committee, to it's credit, is having a rare moment of serious fact-finding. What Lindsey Graham is doing is fanning flames to make himself important.

Graham, not too long ago, was trying to be the "serious" person in Washington who wasn't engaging in this behavior. He wanted to be taken seriously at least then. Now he wants to be a quack, and Senator Jeff Flake is the new "false moderate" of the GOP. Despite a solidly GOP voting record, Flake is trying to make himself the new "serious voice." So, he of course is under-cutting the partisan-hack from South Carolina:

"Well, I've always thought the biggest problem with Benghazi is how it was cast by the administration and the remarks that Susan Rice just really threw in the face of what we knew was going on," Flake responded. "But with regard to the other things that were addressed by this report, well, yes, I thought for a long time that we ought to move beyond that."

When an Arizona Senator is shooting down your wild-eyed conspiracy theory talk, Senator Graham, it's time to shut up and sit down.