Gay minstrel Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina, was on some fuckin' Fox "news" show, and, fluttering frantically like he was a-gownin' up for a gentleman caller like Mr. Ashley Wilkes, declared that those Islamic extremist terrorists are gonna get us here in our little ol' homes if that womanly President Obama won't man up: "I have no idea why the president of the United States won't call this a religious war when the president of Egypt does. Our strategy to combat radical Islam is failing." (By the way, the president of Egypt didn't call it "a religious war.")
Yeah, apparently, Obama just wants to "run out the clock" and hand the problems, especially ISIS, to his successor, which is totally not what George W. Bush did with Iraq and Afghanistan. Graham said, "President Obama's strategy is not going to degrade or destroy [ISIS]. It's going to allow this conflict to go further and longer."
Graham pines for wounded American soldiers he can go caress back to health at Walter Reed, delicately placing their bandaged hands on his face, tears welling up in his eyes, whispering, "You will one day be able to touch me with your skin, Private. I just know you will." The numbers have gone down in the last couple of years, and there are precious few VA patients who don't have "Lindsey Graham skeeves me out" on their charts. While John McCain demands blood for some kind of hideous, karmic vengeance for his own torture, Graham is in it for the soft-lit moments, sitting with blinded warriors and reading to them from his well-worn copy of Walt Whitman, "Again we wander, we love, we separate again,/ Again he holds me by the hand, I must not go,/ I see him close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous." Who will listen to Graham if there are no more wounded?
On Hugh Hewitt's Radio Morgue last week, Graham was even more explicit in his desire for bloodied American flesh: "[T]o destroy ISIL, you’ve got to have an American ground component. Mosul is a city of a million people. Fallujah was a city of a hundred thousand. And the only way we liberated Fallujah from Al Qaeda in Iraq was about 99,000 Marines and American Army personnel. Mosul’s ten times larger. How can the Iraqi Army do it without some American help?" So, by the magic of math, it seems like he wants 990,000 soldiers to go into Mosul. Better get that draft going.
You know what's missing here in all this chest-thumping, Muslim-hating bullshit? That, while the Charlie Hebdo/Jewish grocery attack was awful, there's motherfucking atrocities and a possible genocide happening in Nigeria. Despite what Lindsey Graham and many warmongers want us to believe, a dozen people murdered and the occasional bomb in the West is not a goddamned war. It's organized crime that needs to be stopped (in Iraq, yes, it's a war).
Yeah, they're Islamic, Boko Haram, and they are fucking shit up in Nigeria, using some of those girls they kidnapped (remember them? Yeah, we forgot that whole "Bring back our girls" thing because...squirrel!) as suicide bombers. While CNN was focused on how spendiferous the march in France was (and it was), reports were coming in about horror after horror from Nigeria, including the mass murder of up to 2000 people in a single town, Baga, which is an "economic hub" on the border with Chad, right on Lake Chad. That death toll might not include all the people who drowned trying to swim for safety.
Yet in his parade of awfuls that aren't being dealt by President with in the way he wants them to be, Graham failed to mention anything about Nigeria. If French cartoonists matter, don't Nigerian citizens? It's a shame that Iraq is entrenched in what will be a years-long civil war and that there are no good options in Syria. But it sure appears that Nigeria has a group of Islamic militants who are now starting to metastasize into something that would seem to demand international reaction, no matter how corrupt the governments of Nigeria and Chad may be. (And, you know, c'mon, Iraq and Afghanistan ain't models of clean governance.)
In a soul-draining conversation yesterday, Chuck Todd did bring this up on Meet the (Approved) Press, and, shit you not, conservative fucknut Rich Lowry used the occasion to say, "[T]his is a reason why we have things like the NSA program." Others went on about corruption and radicalization and sectarian violence and no one, not a single person, said, "Yeah, maybe some anti-poverty support and education in a massive program rather than just random NGOs would help, too."
Well, in a few years, we can read in President Obama's memoir or hear in an interview about how he wished he had done more to help in Nigeria.
