So, here is Lindsey Graham’s statement to Fox News on Wednesday regarding whether he and Biden can be friends any longer.

“I’ve known Joe Biden for a long time, I had a good personal relationship with him. He’s a decent man. But what he did in Afghanistan I will never forgive him for, he has blood on his hands, and he’s made America less safe,” Graham said, calling him  “the most consistently wrong man on foreign policy in my lifetime.”

“When it comes to Joe Biden, he’s made America less safe, he’s acted in a very dishonorable way,” he said. “I can’t wait until the next election to stop this socialist train on the domestic side, and have a chance to get a commander in chief that knows how to keep this country safe.”

Gotcha, chief. Your new best friend, Trump, practically let Putin tell us what to do about NATO, and the G-7. But Biden is the most dangerous you’ve ever seen. (NATO and the G-7 sure seemed to appreciate seeing Biden)

This isn’t about foreign policy. Unless Lindsey Graham wanted to be in Afghanistan forever (and don’t tempt him!), Lindsey knew it had to get done and when it came time, it would not be easy. Graham doesn’t believe one single word of the above. There is no socialist train and our president is quite experienced and he will listen to advisors, too. Trump surrendered to ISIS (And the Russians) in Syria, allowing humiliating pictures to circle the globe. Trump did it after one phone call, ONE, on a Sunday night with the Turkish president. Trump listened to the Turkish president over his own team.

Of course, Trump’s own team may not have had Trump’s interests first and foremost, whereas Trump does. He didn’t need their input.

Lindsey is lying about Afghanistan, foreign policy, and keeping the country safe. That is my opinion.

The Afghanistan news broke in late August and September. Now, according to my electric computer, it is 11-11-21, Veterans’ Day, (Or what Canadians call “Remembrance Day.”) So let’s ask ourselves what might have changed in the last week or so that would ignite such passion within Lindsey? Perhaps we have an idea…

POLITICS

As the bipartisan infrastructure bill passes, here’s what’s next for Biden’s economic plans.

Lindsey Graham was one of 19 U.S. GOP Senators to vote for this scaled-down version (the roads and bridges portion) of the infrastructure plan. The House voted on it and passed it three days ago. Biden will sign it next week and that means one thing. Despite the fact that every other week in the Trump administration was “infrastructure week!” it never got done. It never got done because you cannot just declare a theme and hope sh*t gets done, which is all Trump did. Biden had a plan, one which included how much it would cost, how he’d pay for it, what it would do, and, most crucially, Biden knew how to deal with Congress and knew when it was time to walk away with the chips he had. That is how one has an “infrastructure future” and not “infrastructure week.”

But you know that this just infuriates Trump. This is a major victory for Biden and he got some bipartisan support because he earned it. He gave up a few things he wanted and separated out roads and bridges from soft infrastructure. It is also a major victory for the American people. The upgrade in infrastructure got put off when we spent 3-4x the total infrastructure bill (3.4 trillion) in a needless war in Iraq and 18 years too long war in Afghanistan. (Wars very efficiently move money from the public sector to the private sector). The country desperately needed this bill 20 years ago. We don’t look like a first-world nation to travelers.

Donald Trump doesn’t give a fck about the country. He cares about Donald Trump and all he knows is that Biden just got a much bigger infrastructure package through than Trump ever dreamed. Trump knows he looks incompetent. He looks like a loser. He doesn’t know he actually is all those things, he just knows he looks like them…

He wants some heads served up on silver. So he likely goes to the two representatives with – literally – nothing to lose and tells them to start enforcing things: From the NYT:

Hours after the 13 Republicans voted for the bill, explaining in statements that it would deliver badly needed money for transportation and other projects in their districts, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, posted the phone numbers of their Washington offices on her social media accounts.

Marj is still in congress because she will take a phone call from Trump and do whatever Trump damned well asks. Gaetz demanded that these “RINOs” be taken off committees. These are people with decades of experience. Gaetz is a guy who might get decades behind bars.

In separate posts naming them on major social media platforms — Ms. Greene has nearly half a million followers on both Instagram and Twitter — she branded them as “traitors.”

And that’s not all. In his time avoiding Congress, “Sloppy Steve Bannon” put out a list of the Senators that voted in favor, 19 in all, back in August. The list includes McConnell and Graham.

The issue to MAGAs is not about good ideas/bad ideas on roads or spending money. It’s about loyalty to that one man. That one man decided that if he couldn’t get infrastructure done, then no one else should, either. Republicans must remain “loyal” to Trump. Or else.

*Yes, it’s true, Dems likely could have found a way to do it on their own but it would be infinitely harder and weaker without bipartisan support. Trump wanted a block of people united behind him, saying no to everything Biden wants.

Even though the Senate vote was in August, Lindsey might have heard something or just sensed something changing in the landscape and he had better break his relationship with Biden right quick-like. Three days after Congress passed infrastructure, infuriating Trump to the point his surrogates were calling the disloyal “RINOs,” there stands Lindsey, with an even more powerful “Yea” vote in the Senate.

But we are supposed to believe that just two days later, Lindsey decided to come out and say that cherished, beautiful, tearful friendship, is over – because Lindsey didn’t like what Biden did in Afghanistan over two months ago? Lindsey had to say horrible, horrible, things about Biden, “blood on his hands,” “most incompetent president in my lifetime, just made America less safe, all that. I fully believe he likely did it all in an attempt to appease Trump. Lindsey will be Trump’s friend. His one vote of 19 might be forgiven if he calls Biden the worst ever and he now can’t even call him a friend.

That is what I believe is going on here.

Poor LIndsey, 12-20 years ago, he was one of the most respected, well-liked Republican senators on Capitol Hill. As I’ve written before, one wrong joke by a new intern got an ass-chewing, “No, Lindsey is a good guy, leave him out of this…” For the first 18 months or so of Trump’s administration, Lindsey was fairly independent. He blasted Trump on several occasions, mostly to do with foreign affairs and Russia. Then they went golfing. Something happened. Overnight, Lindsey became one of, if not the, most compliant of the powerful senators.

No. No one has any proof of anything. But it looks to all the world like Trump has something on Lindsey, and – no, it’s not his lifestyle, which is hardly a secret and wouldn’t damage him anyway, even in South Carolina. It could be something as simple as a clear crime, maybe he took a bag of $100,000 in cash to bring up some topics in committees or interviews. Or it could be much worse.

But Trump sure loves the dictators around the world, doesn’t he? Putin, MBS, Kim. Trump loves those guys and perhaps he believed he needed to act more like them. Perhaps one of those leaders “strongly suggested it,” maybe even provided information. We don’t know, we may never know. When it comes to specifics, there are a lot of “maybes.” On the overall question, it seems to lead in one direction, at least to me.

What we do know. The man in this video, tearing up, saying Joe Biden is as good a man as anyone is going to meet, is not ending that relationship over pulling out of Afghanistan. But he might have no choice but to “pick” one, Biden, or Trump. If those are his choices, doesn’t it seem likely that there is only one he can pick? And I doubt it’s for the sake of electoral politics.

Is this about politics, Lindsey? Or something much darker?

That Occam guy with the really sharp razor. He keeps looking at the facts and shaking his head.

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[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak/ And Substack: Much Ado About Everything