From Bob Somerby:
So, should the Senate vote to kick Lindsey Graham out on his sorry ass?
The parallels to the case of Richard Blumenthal are, I hope, pretty obvious - except that the intent to deceive, in Graham’s case, goes way further, being a matter of publications rather than possible slips of the tongue in a speech.
(So, what happened back in the 1998 flap? Graham was advised to present himself as a “Gulf War-era veteran,” he did, and everyone that mattered was OK with it.)
While he didn’t technically lie, the implication of his resume is that he served in combat, which is patently false. He’s just another REMF who wants to pump up his image.
Maybe the military has a term-of-art definition for “Operation XXX veteran” that includes support personnel who were never anywhere near the theatre of combat.
But by the meanings that any ordinary American would apply to such things, being a veteran of a combat operation means, at a minimum, being on the same continent as where the combat’s taking place. I’d call it a lie.
Do I think Lindsey Graham should be kicked out of the Senate on that account? No. Do I think the GOP should kick him out to preserve its integrity? Well, I don’t think the GOP has any integrity left anymore, but if I felt it did, I wouldn’t feel it was necessary for them to do this.
But I do love Graham’s whine that "I left my business, my home and friends to perform the duties I was trained for just as the veterans who served in past conflicts have done.’’ He was a native of South Carolina, stationed just outside of Columbia, SC.
Speaking as someone who lived in that city for a few years, hardly anywhere in South Carolina is much more than 2 hours from Columbia. He may have left his home and friends, but was close enough that seeing them on weekends would have been pretty easy.
All I can say is, gawd, what a weenie.
I can’t say I disagree. Voters have to make the call, but I think the behavior is pretty lousy.
Of course, as long as we are pointing out examples, we really ought to mention Tom Harkin, who claimed for years that he flew CAP missions over Vietnam until Barry Goldwater called him on that. He then started describing himself as a Vietnam-era veteran.
Same goes for the people who went all doe-eyed about Ronald Reagan’s “military service” when he never even had to leave Hollywood.
But you have to admit, Ronald Reagan DID single-handedly destroy the Soviet Union.
And took down the Berlin Wall with one speech, like Joshua at Jericho.
Reagan wasn’t deployable because he had terrible eyesight.
How convenient.
Yeah, he couldn’t see getting shot at.
Ba-dum bum. You win the thread. 
Not really. There’s nothing Graham had to sign (like at many jobs) where it said that an error discovered in his resume can be grounds for termination. Likewise, what he did wasn’t illegal and it’s pretty much impossible to prove that voters voted for him solely because of the military claims he made (as if that would make a difference anyway).
So no. We can’t and the Senate shouldn’t kick him out.
Thanks, I just had to explain to co-workers the strange noise I just made. I said it was a sneeze.
Freed the Iranian hostages, too, just by taking the oath of office.
Funny - I never got shot at when I was in either. Most people in the military don’t - as you well know.
Reagan enlisted, lost a good bit of money and never regained the stature he had in films after the war. It wasn’t his fault he had bad eyes. And let’s be fair - he was on active duty all those years, and not pulling a John Wayne.
Do you have some kind of cite showing that he used unfair means to stay stateside? Because everything I have read - even cites very critical of Reagan policies later, generally state that he was too nearsighted to fight.
But he, too, lied about his military service, claiming that he helped liberate the Nazi concentration camps in WWII.
The impression I’m getting is that telling whoppers about one’s military service is a pretty frequent event among politicians even at the highest level. Seems that we’d have to treat the class as a class - treat Reagan, Bush, Graham, Harkin, and Blumenthal all the same. Either none of them has/had any business being in high office, or this should be seen as disqualifying to none of them.
I’m gonna go with ‘none.’ There really aren’t a whole lot of saints among politicians.
That’s true.
Is this a peculiarly American institution? I can’t believe that any of my fellow veterans from the Battle of Waterloo would lie about our military service.
And there’s *another *madman who thinks he’s Napoleon …
Hey, you can’t feed me a straight line like that and expect me to just let it lie there.