Hawks

Political lives almost always end in failure, or at least anticlimax, but Lindsey Graham went to his reward while in the midst of achieving his goals. Indeed, even the timing of his death might advance one of the causes dearest to him. He had just returned from a visit to Kyiv and his fellow advocates of greater US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war have questioned whether he might not have been murdered by Vladimir Putin. The evidence is against that but the South Carolina senator certainly had deadly enemies: he was high on Iran’s hit-list as well. For decades, he’d called for the use of force against the ayatollahs’ regime and he lived to see that call answered. The Republican aviary still has many other hawks. But can any take Graham’s place?

Where is Tulsi Gabbard? The country’s Director of National Intelligence has been glaringly absent as the biggest national security story in years continues to develop. In both the lead-up to and the aftermath of President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, Gabbard has barely been seen, or heard. It’s a strange time for the chief of the US intelligence community to go silent, leading to a growing number of questions that Americans – particularly MAGA Americans – would like answered.It’s Gabbard’s now-infamous testimony to Congress in March – and a video posted to social media earlier this month – that are thought to have sidelined her from the Trump administration in recent weeks.

Cockburn has never been much of a hawk, unless you count his begrudging deficit hawkery over the massive tab he ran up at his local bar. But many elected Republicans are very hawkish on foreign policy, supporting "peace through strength," as Ronald Reagan put it, as well as occasionally war through strength. So how are the GOP's highest-flying hawks handling Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Cockburn was surprised to find them divided. Nearly every Republican lawmaker (and Democrat for that matter) agrees that we need to throttle Russia with economic sanctions. It's on the question of whether the United States should implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine that the cracks begin to show.

It was a beautiful moment of bipartisan unity when, left and right, American and European, young and old, united to call Lindsey Graham a moron. The South Carolina senator made headlines Thursday night after appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox. He openly called for Vladimir Putin to be assassinated: How does this end? Somebody in Russia has to step up to the plate. Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there more successful Col. Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends, my friend, is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out! You would be doing your country a great service and the world a great service. Graham doubled down on his insanely dangerous comments on Twitter right after. Best to put this kind of stupidity in writing, in case there was any confusion.