Ladies and Gents, This is Lindsey Graham

Graham blocks resolution recognizing Armenian genocide after Trump-Erdoğan meeting https://t.co/VURZgeFkqn pic.twitter.com/PzGP1sHFUL

— The Hill (@thehill) November 14, 2019

Senator Lindsey Graham met with his golf buddy Trump and his golf buddy's good friend President Recep Erdogan and has decided that the US Senate should not be so hasty (It's been, like, a century, so?) about condemning the Armenian genocide. He says he's objecting "not because of the past, but because of the future." This is happening while, in the present, Kurds are being subjected to war crimes by Turkey.

Before we condemn Graham too swiftly, he never showed much interest in the history of the genocide of Armenians previously. Opposition to such a resolution has a bit of a history, actually, and it has been rejected before for the same kind set of general reasons--because what does it have to do with what is happening now?

The problem I have with this thinking is that not acknowledging the past is a way of denying the events that led to our present. Today, politicians are already coming up with their reasons for why we're going to be okay with ignoring what is happening to the Kurds. What we tolerated in the past, we demonstrate we can tolerate again. We have already witnessed the senator contort himself over whether Trump's concession to Erdogan in greenlighting his military advance into Syrian Kurdistan was a great "out of the box" idea. We will soon dispense with even sanctions, correct? if Graham become concerned about "the future" where sanctions inhibited Trump's out of the box thinking.

Which I think might mean something to do with Graham's perception of his own future in being elected once again to the Senate in the upcoming 2020 election? Because I know, because Graham has said so himself, he worries about the demographic changes the country is going through and what it means to his party, and he has seen that Trump can harness forces of isolation, resentment, division, and "economic anxiety" to establish a solid turnout regardless of issues of right or wrong, or even what conservatives have previously supported. (Or for that one time. In 2016. With a possible assist.)

Or maybe Graham still just doesn't give a shit about Armenians, because in South Carolina.... except South Carolinians actually do give a good goddamn about people who have suffered. Even if Graham cares a little bit more about himself and his Erdogan and Putin loving friend right now.

Graham is wrong an awful lot. It's the malleability and toady-ness of his wrongness, of late, that is simply striking. And I would be remiss if I did not point out that South Carolina has a lovely alternative who would like very much to work for them, and has not established himself as a Washington DC, Sunday chat show know it all hack who is, staggeringly wrong on moral concerns.