Lindsey Graham is at it again: The long-serving, if increasingly embattled, senator from South Carolina has produced an especially aggressive as well as hysterical statement.

This time, he has, in essence, threatened Russia with US bombing in a little less than two months from now.

If you know Graham’s record, then that may appear insane but also sort of unremarkable, because that’s just choleric, red-faced Lindsey having a normal rant.

Yet there are reasons not to dismiss this particular tantrum too quickly. Even though Graham is probably too busy foaming at the mouth to notice, his latest hissy fit is unintentionally revealing.

For one thing, there’s a whiff of panic about this outburst. And Graham does have reasons to feel less than comfortable.

For starters, as noted above, his seat in the Senate is anything but secure, with Graham facing what The Independent has called a ’daunting challenge’ coming up next year. Then, Graham will have to defend his seat, which he has held since 2003, in midterms that could go badly for him.

His current approval rating in his home state is a squalid 34 per cent. America’s MAGA base is, at best, ambiguous about the ageing opportunist from South Carolina.

That means that the most dangerous challengers to Graham are not Democrats but fellow Republicans who point out his very real selfishness and bottomless unreliability.

One thing that voters at home hold against Graham is his prominent and extremely aggressive commitment to what most of us on planet Earth would call US imperialism, but what Americans prefer to think of as globalism. 

That is what Bauer is going after, for instance. And for good reason: There really is no war of aggression, economic warfare campaign, information war drive, or lawfare offensive that the decidedly un-martial-looking Graham is not wildly, almost orgasmic, erotically enthusiastic about.

Graham loved the 2003 Iraq War, for instance, so much that even when he finally came to admit that it was based on ‘faulty intelligence’, a lie to cover for a lie, by the way: in reality, the war was based on deliberate deception, he still insisted it could have been worth it, as long as Iraq would turn into ’a democracy.’ 

That that is certainly not a thing the Iraqis could possibly learn from the American plutocracy, is a thought too honest to even cross Graham’s mind.

And, of course, Graham has always been a fervent, passionate, and steamy Russophobe. Indeed, there is a way in which Moscow should be grateful for Graham.

Like his European equivalent, Kaja Kallas, the South Carolina senator is walking proof that the only thing that can, ultimately, secure Russia against Western warmongers in all-too-high places is military strength, including nuclear deterrence.

Indeed, Graham is so obsessed with sticking it to the Russians that his latest fetish is to not only assault Moscow but everyone who has any dealings with it.

The most important aspect of the Uber sanctions bill, lovingly put together by Graham and his Democratic fellow traveler Senator Richard Blumenthal, is the plan to ’impose a 500 percent tariff on imported goods from countries that buy Russian oil, gas, uranium and other products.’

The idea is that these ‘sledgehammer’ secondary sanctions would then do what the West has been trying and failing to do for years now: isolate Russia.

They would not, obviously. If ever applied, this policy will only massively antagonize its targets, including Brazil, China, and India, and help to isolate the US, if anyone. Not to mention the immense economic damage it would inflict, in America, too.

While Trump has been making noise, as he tends to, the Senate majority leader has quietly shelved Graham’s uber sanctions bill, at least for now. Graham, clearly, feels threatened: He is insisting that his pet bill must not be stopped.

Graham is an all-around addict to bullying and extreme violence. It seems he gets off on it.

He clearly takes a sadistic pleasure in publicly fantasizing about dishing out brutality even above what the US and its accomplices are already inflicting on their victims.

Last year, for instance, he felt called upon to encourage Israel to complete its Gaza genocide by dropping nukes on the Palestinians.

And, of course, he is one of the all too many Americans who still steadfastly believe that Washington’s own dropping of atom bombs to massacre the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just fine.

Not for Graham and his ilk to acknowledge what historians, such as Gar Alperovitz, have long shown: Japan was already defeated; the bombings were not only enormous war crimes, the crowning point of a massive campaign of mass-murderous urban fire-bombing, but gratuitous, even by the vicious logic of US air warfare; and they were the outcome of sheer bloodlust catalyzed by racism and a cynical strategy to threaten the Soviet Union, then, officially, still an ally of the US.

Graham’s commitment to slaughter and plunder abroad is so intense that some Americans, especially in that MAGA base again, are attacking him openly:

Much of US policy is as vicious and pernicious as can be. Or, at least, as most of us can imagine. But for Graham it is never bad enough.

The irony is, of course, that the more America approaches the dystopian maximum of aggression Graham craves, the more the US is losing not only its standing (not much to lose there, really) but its reach.

Graham is not simply the proverbial ugly American. He is the, quite literally, repulsive American, embodying a negative energy that helps propel the world to move beyond an order still far too much shaped by the US. You can share this story on social media:

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