What is up with Lindsey Graham?
Several strange things have happened since John McCain's death and subsequent funeral in Washington DC. I quite do not know what to make of all this, so I am just putting it out here. My spidey sense tells me there is much more going on in the background than just the normal political intrigue.
Let's look at Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina and well known war hawk sidekick to the recently departed John McCain who was probably the most hawkish Senator in recent history. At McCain's funeral in Washington DC, an extraordinary event occurred immediately following the service and it was all caught on video.
Before you read further, please view the video below. It is in slow motion and should either be viewed via the YouTube link or on full screen to get the full effect of what happened.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEDXIhTApiU]
In the video, Graham is seen standing next to former Republican Senator from New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte when Huma Abedin comes sweeping in from his right, moving right past Generals Mattis and Kelly. Abedin goes right up to Graham and hugs him while whispering something in his ear. She then acknowledges Ayotte before speaking once again to Graham. Immediately, after this exchange, she leaves quickly, like the dragon lady she is, walking right by Kelly without looking at him in any form of acknowledgement.
In the meantime, both Mattis and Kelly are keeping a hawkeye on the entire incident. After the Huma incident, Graham looks extremely nervous and avoids eye contact with Kelly who is staring straight at him. Finally Graham and Kelly make eye contact and Kelly makes a hand signal as if to say, "I am watching your every move." Graham becomes even more nervous and adjusts his suit jacket. After a brief period of time, Graham goes over to Kelly and whispers something in his ear.
All I know is that Kelly is all business and an intimidating force to be reckoned with.
So what happened in this exchange? Has Graham become a pawn in this power game and Huma was sent to remind him who his real masters are? Or has Graham flipped and is now playing on the Trump team?
There is some evidence to back this latter theory up based upon Graham's vocal support for Brett Kavanaugh to be the next justice of the Supreme Court. Graham who clearly did not support Trump in the Presidential election of 2016 is now not only supporting Kavanaugh but was the lead in questioning on Constitutionality of the use of military tribunals in the case of treason.
This line of questioning was very interesting when viewed in the perspective of a major Freudian slip made by Ohio Governor John Kasich during an interview with Chris Cuomo this weekend.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNT11ogFwk]
Could this be why Lindsey Graham pursued his line of questioning of Brett Kavanaugh and did this line of questioning confirm that Graham has flipped, possibly to save his own skin?
Comments
McCain left a hole; he played a big role.
Lindsey may be just lost. I don't think the tights will fit him.
@Pluto's Republic As I heard it, he never
As I heard it, he never wanted Palin. He wanted Joe Lieberman. Probably because he actually had some intelligence as far as campaign politics were concerned.
Later, however, he looked incredibly relieved not to have won.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Kasich made an interesting slip of the tongue
Why on earth would he have said that about McCain's death? This seemed to have come out of nowhere in the context of the conversation.
Huma is up to her eyeballs with everything that Hillary has been involved in and her family has some very strange connections to shady characters. The exchange between her and Graham and then Kelly did seem weird. Then there's Graham having little to do with McCain's funeral after they had been BFFs for so long. Something is up.
Some apologists for Kasich
claim he meant to say "less than 24 hours after he was laid to rest," But that does not all at sound anything like he said.
I believe word is out among deep staters and their toadies and a lot of people are very nervous.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Probably a Scalia scenario.
Very sick man has a big party and then goes upstairs to let the deed be done.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
He was Grover Dill to McCain's Scut Farkus...
And like any crummy little toadie he's lost without his bully.
" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "
Henry steals the show!
The guy is hysterical.
First, as Huma glides by him he puts in hand to his face as if to say, "Ooh, I don't think I vanna vatch dis."
Then of course he slyly turns his head and starts listening in surreptitiously.
Huma skulks out with Kelly glaring daggers at guilty school boy Graham.
Henry turns to Kelly and gives him a 'ya bedda vatch dis guy' look.
Kelly looks at Henry. Looks straight through Lindsey.
And points to his eye! ("I'm watchin' you Graham.")
Graham, sporting the complexion of a just-kissed Fredo, pads his pockets like he's looking for his car keys.
Also don't miss Joe Lieberman hovering at Graham's back. You know if push comes to shove and Graham does try to jump on the Trump train, ol' Joey two-timer will be the guy who has to slip his good buddy the shiv.
Man, I hope we get more of these funerals.
Not just because it means the old guard is finally (finally!) going to that great elephant graveyard in the sky, but because the drama of watching the deep state in full factional meltdown makes Mario Puzo look like a dime store hack.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
Damn! I love this sentence,
particularly the second half.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Thanks.
Think it's time for a new sig line.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
Did you notice Kissinger giving the white power sign
while holding his cane?
Seriously, people are actually thinking Kasich made a Freudian slip with that? It's beyond me. Relative to Graham, he's a republican, it's probably as simple as that.
Sorry, all this stuff about Trump and those against Trump is getting on my nerves. I think it distracts from the overall picture which is they're ALL fucked up.
But, 9/11 WAS a false flag inside job. That I believe. No, that I know.
IMHO, it is about rethinking
It is not about Democrats versus Republicans, or liberal versus conservative, or even anyone against Trump. What we ware seeing here right now is an attempt at dismanteling the deep state. Yes, Trump is President, but he is not calling the shots on this operation. He may get credit for it if it works, but that is not the point of this post at all.
The deep state players are both Democrats and Republicans.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Why would you conclude
that Trump is not part of the effort against the deep state?
The deep state is trying to overthrow Trump. Do you think he is not taking any actions against this effort?
dfarrah
Based upon
some of the Q posts over the last ten months of time, a number of people in military intelligence developed a Plan for taking down the deep state long before Trump was elected. The story is that Trump was asked to run by these people because he came from outside the Washington DC establishment.
So what I am saying is that the Plan is not Trump's idea, but that this is a military operation being conducted by military intelligence with Trump's knowledge and support.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
What's a bff to do?
One good thing about video is it is quality evidence. The bad thing is putting it into context.
These fuckers speak in code. Facial expressions, body language, small gestures, and you and I aren't code breakers.
The sequence is clear, however. "Stay with us" says Huma, "You better get with us" says Mattis, and Lindsey is caught on video trying to figure out which way to go without his hero to lead him.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Quality evidence for what?
I agree with everyone's interpretations about the body language, but I don't get the assertion that it is 'evidence.'
dfarrah
I just returned from a trip to Jordan.
All news coming from the US was about McCain, the "hero".
I spent my time and money drinking beer for $15 a glass, rather than watch that stupid shit.
McCain, in his life and his death, has cost me money.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
You should have gotten some arak,
it would have been a lot cheaper, and likely a more authentic experience.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
I don't remember seeing it at all.
I will confess I asked my tour guide to locate a store where booze was sold, whether a grocery store, liquor store, whatever is allowed in Jordan.
He got the bus driver to stop at a liquor store. He was prohibited from escorting us into it, and said he would consider it professionally as a cultural exchange in his report.
The bus emptied out, poured into that store.
My tour companions said their various wines were good.
I stuck with Amstel beer, for whatever reason, is always available in hotels and restaurants.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Personally, don't think Kasich's
playing with a full deck. Actually, I wouldn't care, except that he is currently the Deep State's/One Percent's nominative Republican 2020 nominee.
Heck, just look at the Dude! He looks like an escapee from an olden-day lunatic (insane) asylum, as they were called in the era before our modern-day psychiatric hospitals replaced them.
Take a gander at this,
Need I say more?
Blue Onyx
“At the end of the day, people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”
~~Maya Angelou
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
~~Lao Tzu
Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.
Seriously, saw an article on Twitter about Abedin's
relationship to McCain. Remember, McCain and FSC were big buds. And, of course, Huma was FSC's longtime assistant.
Apparently, McCain came to Abedin's rescue years ago--reputationally. Here's what was on Twitter,
Could it be yet another example of bipartisan "one hand washing the other," which is so typical of the DC Swamp/Uniparty?
Blue Onyx
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong."
~~W. R. Purche
“At the end of the day, people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”
~~Maya Angelou
Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.
Abedin's family is full of the Muslim brotherhood
This is well known. McCain was very friendly with terrorists from different groups as well as the neo Nazis in Ukraine. This is what he is going to be remembered for. Getting the terrorists armed to the teeth with weapons so they could overthrow Gaddafi and Assad. This is why Syria and Russia were going into Idlib and either kill them or get them to surrender.
They have delayed doing it for now because they are worried about civilians casualties.
Maybe it has
been discovered that she is part of some nefarious effort.
Then again, we sell arms to everyone and support any terrorist group that the US deems necessary, so the US has already been sold out by a lot of high level politicians/businesspeople.
dfarrah
People like McCain and Clinton
used their government offices to become involved in arms, drugs, and human trafficking all over the world. They are traitors. McCain was pictured on a secret trip to Syria to meet with several high level ISIS terrorists in 2013.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
I remember how weirded out I was upon discovering,
right smack in the middle of Hillary’s campaign and Big Moment in the Spotlight of History —
that Anthony Weiner (yes, he of the sexting scandals) — was Hillary campaign chair and confidante Huma Abedin’s husband.
Weiner's laptop has over 700,000 emails
that belong to Hillary. Some from her time from before she became SOS. When the NY FBI discovered that they wanted to go public, but they were threatened not to by Lynch. This is why Comey had to tell congress that more emails had been discovered.
Watch the Jake Tapper interview with Papadopolous
As part of this detangling exercise, it is worth watching the Jake Tapper interview with Papdopolous, who had multiple meetings with heads of state, with Israeli agents, receives $10,000 in small bills in Tel Aviv, "marries" a woman who he has just met -- and claims he doesn't know what any of these meetings were about nor why he received this money in small bills. But he took it
. And he and his "wife" joke about whether either one of them will ever know whether the other is a secret agent. Worth taking the time to watch this player who just received all of 14 days in jail.
I guess I don't quite
get this about LG having "flipped."
LG presents his rationale below, which seems reasonable to me without bringing in some odd connections to explain the change:
"While most Republicans fell in line before the 2016 election, Lindsey Graham—along with fellow senators Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, John McCain, and Rob Portman—was a high-profile NeverTrumper on Election Day. “My party has gone batshit crazy,” Graham said in a February 2016 speech about Trump. Graham told Fox News that Trump is “a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit to be president.”
But sometime after the election, Graham became a neo-Trumper. “You know what concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the president some kind of kook,” Graham said in November 2017. “I intend to support him in 2020 without equivocation,” Graham tells me now.
What changed since 2016? A neoconservative, in Irving Kristol’s famous formulation, was a liberal who’d been mugged by reality. Neo-Trumpers like Graham, then, are NeverTrumpers who were mugged by—what, exactly? Necessity? Expediency? Sean Hannity?
To hear Graham tell it, policy is what changed his mind. “He’s on track to do big things,” Graham says of the president. “He built up the military. I campaigned on it. He got out of the Iran deal. I campaigned on it. He’s destroying ISIL. I campaigned on it. He’s restructuring the tax code and the way we do business. I campaigned on it. He’s doing much of what I campaigned on, and I’m pleased.” Graham now speaks regularly with Trump and has become a close ally on matters ranging from North Korea to health care.
What about the issues of temperament that in 2016 made Trump, in Graham’s view, unfit to be president? Is there anything specific, I ask, that has convinced the senator that Trump isn’t the “kook” Graham called him back then? “One, I got to know him,” Graham says. “I’ve played golf with him. You know, play golf with somebody for three or four hours, you get to know them better. He’s funny as hell. He’s got a great sense of humor. There’s a method to the madness.”
“He’s nobody’s fool,” Graham adds. “Very smart. And he asks a lot of good questions.”
From the link below (in 2018)
https://www.weeklystandard.com/john-mccormack/the-neo-trumper
It seems like when LG and T agree, all is fine; when they don't, there is fireworks.
dfarrah
Graham
McCain was a part of the deep state and heavily involved in the sale of arms. Graham was his sidekick and toadie.
You need to think beyond the usual politics and rhetoric. There is a silent war going on between the deep state and the military. The evidence is starting to build up first by seeing the depth of corruption in the FBI. The DoJ was also infected and house cleaning is still going on. And there is a good chance we will see criminal charges against some of these people. The deep state does not discriminate between Republicans and Democrats. There are plenty traitors on both sides. And the walls began to start to close in once Trump was elected, simply because he came from outside DC and was not part of the deep state.
The line of questioning that Graham presented to Kavanaugh during confirmation hearings is indicative that he is working with the Trump administration concerning the use of military tribunals to punish treasonous activities. Then the way that General Kelly stared down Graham after the Huma Abedin encounter and Graham's very nervous reaction afterwards leads me to believe that Graham is on a very short leash.
Sure, it is speculation on my part, but like I have presented here, there are too many weird things happening and they bear watching, especially in the context of the Qanon drops.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
@gulfgal98 Well...
Well...
The military seems to me to be divided. Part of the military is undeniably with the Deep State--I mean, Keith Alexander is a general, after all. Stanley McChrystal is obviously part of the Deep State.
Basically any high-ranking military who's either been extensively involved with the NSA or CIA side of things, or who plays in the morally gray-toned and legally blurry area of "fifth branch" military activity is probably part of the Deep State.
Apparently, the military is divided; so, I think, is the Deep State, except there it's a more ordinary divide: some of the rank-and-file who work at Langley or Fort Meade aren't happy with the direction their agencies have been going, nor with their bosses. How many of the malcontents are still left inside those agencies is anybody's guess. Less than there were before Bush and Cheney ran their little purge right before their second coronation.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I would bet that some
surveillance power could have picked up Abedin's whispers.
Is surveillance now able to hear whispers?
dfarrah
Well, they can even recover audio from visual-only recording
so I bet the answer to your question is yes.
https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804
Well, we need to
get moving with this stuff (whoever 'we' might be). How does someone on our side buy some of this technology? It seems everyone is using it against each other except for our side.
Politicians and business require our oversight.
dfarrah
@lotlizard Those scientists and
Those scientists and engineers should be fucking ashamed.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Handing authoritarians ever more dangerous tools of repression?
Like Wernher von Braun in Tom Lehrer’s song, I’m sure the masters of tech have well-worked-out rationalizations for everything they do, though.
Hmmm ...
Trying to read palace politics from scenes like this is probably hopeless, though it is interesting.
Yesterday I saw a small headline saying that the Republicans might need Pence to cast a tie breaking vote for Kavanaugh. That tells me that they aren't 100% certain of all the Republican senators.
The only two names that come to mind are Murkowski and Graham.
If the Kavanaugh effort falls short by one vote, Washington will be in an uproar. They are pushing Kavanaugh to make sure Trump gets his case(s) dismissed. Once the election is over (unlike most people I think the Democrats will barely take the Senate, with 51 or 52 seats tops) there will be no chance for the Republicans to push through some tool like Kavanaugh. They'll have to nominate someone that is agreeable to Democrats, and it will take El Trumpo a while to accept that. We may have a vacancy for quite some time.
So I'm wondering if the Clintons are trying to flip Graham. Do they have dirt on him? Are they convincing him to switch parties to the new Democratic majority? His career as a Republican would be shit if he flipped.
I'm giving about a 10% chance that when the voting for Kavanaugh happens, Graham will be the single vote that keeps him out.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
Graham will vote for Kavanaugh
Graham is on a very short leash as evidenced by his interaction with General Kelly. Susan Collins is far more likely than Graham to vote independently on the Kavanaugh nomination.
I am not sure what case you are referring to getting dismissed.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy