Lindsey Graham Discovers That They're All Bozos on His Bus

It turns out that three-term United States Senator Lindsey Graham -- the co-sponsor of the most recent, hideous, malformed, stillborn monster of a Republican Repeal and Fuck You bill -- had no idea what he was doing.  

Yes, very much like Republican party base voter template boy, Homer Simpson --

Homer: "Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rain forest scare a few years back. Our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?" 

Lisa: "No, Dad, I don't think..." 

Homer: "There's that word again!"

-- Lindsey Goober Graham just assumed that out there, somewhere, some other Republican congress that wasn't packed to the rafters with braying demagogues, racist con men and assorted other complete dolts had been tinkering away for the last seven years on some superfuckingawesome Republican health care bill.  And that, when it came time to slap his name on something, he could just rip off their notes, walk it around the Senate and the Sunday shows sounding smart, and then, bing-bang-boom, Lindsay Graham, Health Care Genius is born.

Unfortunately, Senator Graham only reads lurid David Brooks Beltway porn about The!Amazing! Republican!Renaissance!That!Is!Always!Just!Around!The!Corner! and does not sully himself with dirty, low-brow blogs like this.  Because if he did, he would have learned that we here at the driftglass blog blew the lid off of this whole "there's a whole 'nother Republican congress hiding in the woods someplace doing terrific, groundbreaking work on stuff" rumor a long time ago.

But Senator Graham had to find out the hard way.  

And it went a little something like this (from The Intercept):

LINDSEY GRAHAM ON OBAMACARE REPEAL: I HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WAS DOING

Ryan Grim, Aída Chávez

Senate Democrats and their progressive allies spent the last week and a half in a full-blown mobilization against an existential threat to the Affordable Care Act.

Now that it has fizzled out, the lead author of the measure, known as the Graham-Cassidy bill, has an admission to make: He had no clue what he was doing.

“It’s been the most amazing journey of my life. I’ve taken the eye off the ball on terrorism, I’m just amazed the whole planet hasn’t crumbled because I wasn’t on it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said of the weeks he’s spent leading the health care repeal effort.

Toward the end of the senator’s bid to rewrite the health care system, as the mirage of the bill’s momentum began to be exposed, the typically charming and witty Graham began to turn acidic in the halls of the Senate, denouncing colleagues in both parties who were objecting to his legislation. “I’m speaking English, right?” he snapped at one reporter.

But now that it’s over, the old Graham is back and more than willing to laugh at how improbable it was that a national security expert briefly held the national limelight as a supposed health policy wonk.

Graham, though, said he was not alone in his lack of understanding of health care. “Nobody in our conference believes Obamacare works. It must be replaced. But until now, we didn’t know how to do it,” Graham told reporters in the Capitol on Tuesday [audio available in the original article].

A reporter pointed out that such ignorance at this late stage is hard to understand. “You’ve been working to overhaul this for seven years. Why is this so hard?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve been doing it for about a month. I thought everybody else knew what the hell they were talking about, but apparently not,” Graham clarified, adding he had assumed “these really smart people will figure it out.”...

Three-term.

United States.

Senator.

Behold, a Tip Jar!