Meet the Press's Lindsey Graham Tribute Was Revolting Beyond Belief
Witness TV news at its most corrupt and morally bankrupt.
Did you know that Discourse Blog has a podcast? It’s true! It’s called Discourse Pod and it comes out every single week—and paid subscribers get access to exclusive bonus episodes and our special After Dark segments. Tune in here or wherever you get your podcasts!
The death of Senator Lindsey Graham this weekend was a surprise. The outpouring of nauseating memorializing that greeted his death was mostly not a surprise.
By now, we all know how this stuff goes. First, a bad person dies. Lindsey Graham definitely checks that box. He was an awful human being whose most pleasurable experience in life was watching people getting bombed to smithereens overseas. You can go elsewhere for longer rundowns of his many horrible deeds; for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to assume we’re on the same page here.
Second, a bunch of prominent people fall over themselves to share the most bootlicking remembrances of their beloved monster. That box has also most definitely been checked. Here’s Senator Adam Schiff gushing about how funny Lindsey was! Here’s Cory Booker in a stupid shirt reminiscing about all the good times he and Lindsey used to have! Here’s actor and activist Jesse James Rose talking about how Graham once “paid a twinky pre-transition college student a fat stack of cash to do unspeakable things to him in a hotel room while he wore red lingerie!” (In case it wasn’t clear, Rose was the aforementioned pre-transition twink.) OK, maybe that one doesn’t quite fit the bill, but it’s too good not to include here. Is it true? Not true? One thing is certain: you can’t libel the dead. Let a thousand of these flowers bloom, folks—the time to dish is now.
By now, this type of discourse cycle has mostly dulled into predictable tedium. Everyone’s playing their part, either maligning the dead or being mad about maligning the dead or being mad about not maligning the dead, yada yada yada. Normally, I’d just leave things there. I’m tired!
But. BUT! But. That was before the world was graced with one of the most hall-of-fame, EGOT, Triple Crown, Olympic gold medal-level revolting examples in the history of this particular genre. It came from Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, and it is just—well, we’d better go through it piece by piece. That’s right—there are multiple parts to this thing, and each one gets worse than the last.
OK, enough dancing around it—let’s, sigh, dive in.
