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What Lindsay Graham Never Had The Chance To Do

7/12/2026

It's Gospel truth that none of us knows the day or the hour when our soul will be required of us. And yet, whether one held U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham in esteem or contempt, who among us wasn't shocked to wake up to the news this morning that this man who had loomed so large in the national consciousness for decades was dead? Not only did Lindsay Graham die suddenly last night, but only hours after returning from Ukraine, where he was involved in a diplomatic mission of the highest level with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Someone once told me they believed that we don't die until we've finished everything we need to do on earth. Appealing as that thought may be, people die too early too often to put much stock in it.
In any case, I don't believe it was true for Lindsay Graham. Though he accomplished much, for better or worse, during his lifetime, and his last undertaking during his time on earth was certainly a significant one that played out on the world stage, still I believe there was one more to-do Lindsay Graham probably intended to take care of someday, but now never will.
I believe that Senator Graham was likely planning, when the time was right and he felt it was safe, on renouncing Donald Trump. I say this because in the past, at times when Graham had nothing to lose and nothing to gain by being honest and standing up for his convictions, he did condemn Trump.
Back in 2015 Graham excoriated Donald Trump as a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." In the election year 2016 he said, "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it." In those days he called Trump a jackass. He refused to vote for him in the 2016 Presidential election.
But then a few months after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Lindsay Graham turned from a fiery principled critic of Trump to Trump's most faithful ally and staunchest defender.
That is, until the MAGA attack on the Capital in 2021, after which Graham seemed to have unearthed his moral righteousness, saying of his former relationship with Trump, "All I can say is a count me out. Enough is enough."
But then a short time later, when it became clear that the members of the Republican Congress lacked the courage to convict Trump for his role in inciting the Capitol attack, Lindsay Graham once again tossed aside his integrity and followed the Republican majority in voting against Donald Trump's conviction.
And when Donald Trump's star once again began to rise, Lindsay Graham once again hitched the wagon of his political career to that star.

But in quiet moments of self-honesty, did Lindsay Graham not know that he sold his soul, and did he not plan someday, when Donald Trump was out of office and influence, on repenting his relationship with Trump and publicly buying back his soul and his legacy?
I'll bet he did. But even Lindsay Graham didn't know the day or the hour his soul would be required of him and his legacy set in time.

References:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/from-staunch-critic-to-fierce-ally-grahams-long-strange-and-consequential-friendship-with-trump

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgj25j6nmeo

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Why They Could Get Away With What Graham Platner Can't

7/8/2026

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Why They Could Get Away With What Graham Platner Can't

As of tonight, Wednesday, July 8, it's over for Graham Platner, the magnetic progressive populist oyster farmer who became the Democratic Party's Great Blue Collar Hope for winning back the United States Senate.

As the whole country by now knows, Platner was accused by a former girlfriend of entering her house and raping her while he was blackout drunk, a state caused by a vast intake of alcohol during which a person is capable of walking, talking, and committing rape or other forms of violence, but incapable of remembering later what transpired while they were intoxicated.
Graham Platner denies he raped his girlfriend. That's likely because he doesn't remember raping her.
True, Platner had a history of alcohol abuse, ill treatment of women, and an erased Nazi tattoo. But those of us who were rooting for him were willing to overlook his sins of the past because his seemed to be a story of redemption, of going and sinning no more, of a turning away from his reprobate past and a recovery from the PTSD that stoked his substance abuse and the subsequent abusive behavior it caused.
But rape, even committed while in a state of trauma-induced blackout drunkenness, and even if it happened years ago, was a sin too far, an aggression that wouldn't stand. This was disheartening for those of us who saw in Graham Platner not only a chance of winning back the Senate for the Democrats but a champion for progressive policies on issues such as healthcare, housing, climate, education, billionaires paying their fair share in taxes, and more.
But what Graham Platner stands for now doesn't matter. Democrats, myself included, have dropped and renounced him. His political career is dead, along with our hopes for what he might have accomplished.
Still, I found myself pondering with my mate Tom how it could be that someone like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth could get away with having paid off a woman he drugged and raped in a hotel room and, according to former coworkers, frequently coming in drunk to his job at Fox News. Not to mention his Nazi tattoos, which he didn't even feel the need to remove.

Or how RFK Jr. could breeze by an accusation of sexual assault by his children's nanny with the excuse that he wasn't a choirboy.

Or how the accusations by dozens of women of rape and sexual assault against Donald Trump didn't keep him from being twice elected President of the United States, or continually loved by his MAGA base and supported by his Party faithful.

"It's this simple," said Tom. "These days a Republican can get away with it. A Democrat can't. The Democrats just won't put up with that kind of behavior in their leaders anymore."
I guess that's why I'm a Democrat.

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My Bicentennial Story For America's 250th

7/4/2026

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My Bicentennial Story For America's 250th

Today being a very special birthday for our country, I thought I'd share my 4th of July memory - which happens to be my favorite of all favorite 4th of July memories - of where I spent our nation's last big birthday celebration, the Bicentennial, on July 4, 1976.
Like millions of Americans, I spent that very special Fourth of July at a family picnic. Our picnic was in a lovely meadow outside a small village in Hungary a few kilometers from the Soviet border.
In the spring of 1976 I was working for the U.S. Army as a crafts instructor on a post in Aschaffenburg, Germany,

...and was engaged to a young captain named Tom Liszkay.

By May Tom's tour of duty was up and I'd left my job and we were touring around Europe by Eurailpass for a few months before returning home to the States.

Tom being between a first and second generation American - his mother was a Hungarian immigrant and his father was born in the United States of Hungarian immigrants,

...we decided to include in our travels a trip to Hungary to visit his uncles, aunts, and cousins there.
Now, in those days Hungary was part of the Soviet Bloc, a Communist state under strict control of the Soviet Union, as Russia was known at that time. The United States and the Soviet Union being Cold War enemies back then, for an American to travel behind the Iron Curtain was a weence daring. And scary.
But back in those days Tom and I were young and more than a weence daring. And only a little scared. (Though Tom, with his Hungarian name, was slightly more scared than I was).
Before our trip we needed to visit the Hungarian Embassy in Cologne, Germany, to acquire visas to enter Hungary,

...and permits to travel around the country.

(We were told we would be required to register with the police upon our arrival in each new town. If we did not, we were warned that upon leaving Hungary our travel passes would be checked at the border and if there were not dates stamped on our passes reflecting everywhere we'd been...well, I don't know exactly what would have happened. Of the four families we visited, nobody wanted to take us to the police station and two absolutely refused to. I suppose that with armed soldiers patrolling the streets everywhere we went, people wanted to stay under the radar. We somehow got out without any adverse consequences, though).
From Cologne we traveled to Berlin, since were in the neighborhood,

...and from Berlin on to Vienna.
In the last days of June we crossed from Austria into Hungary, where we would crisscross the country visiting Tom's relatives in the towns of:
Győr,

...a good-sized city where Tom's uncle, aunt and cousin lived in a tiny apartment with a living room, a small kitchen, a bathroom and one bedroom. Tom told me that his uncle had once owned the whole building, but after the Communists appropriated the building and redistributed the apartments his family was allotted this one. Tom's aunt and uncle normally slept in the living room and his teenage cousin had the bedroom, but during our visit we were given the bedroom while the family slept in the living room.

From Győr we traveled to Pusztadobos,

...then Nyíregyháza,

...and Salgotarjan,

...where Tom's cousin, a hair dresser, gave me what she called a "beautiful frizura (hairdo)" so I would look good in Budapest, our last stop along the way,

...and which I thought was a more beautiful city than Vienna, in spite of the old bullet and mortar shell wounds in some of the buildings left over from the 1956 Hungarian revolution, when the country tried, but failed, to break free of the Soviet Union.
And, aside from the armed soldiers patrolling the streets in the cities and one young, bored functionary in the tiny village police department in Pusztadobos who obviously felt that it was the chance of a lifetime to meet and intimidate two American visitors, the Hungarians in general were the nicest, most generous, friendliest folks I've ever met. They didn't speak much English, Tom spoke - and taught me - only a few words of Hungarian, and yet we all managed to somehow communicate.
Which brings me to July 4, 1976, the Bicentennial. It so happened that our itinerary brought us to the village of Pusztadobos, the rural village on the Soviet border from which Tom's mother emigrated, on Saturday, July 3.
Soon after we arrived Tom's young cousins,

...took us for a walk around the village. It looked like a place out of a storybook. Some of the homes had thatched roofs. There were cherry trees growing along the paths.
At one point the children ran into some of their friends. During the course of their conversation I thought I heard the words "Abbot and Costello" repeated several times. Turned out I did.
Turned out there was going to be on television that night an old black and white Abbot and Costello movie from the 1950's, but apparently an American movie showing on TV - even an old black and white one - was a national event. Tom's relatives bought a special dessert from the bakery for us all to enjoy while watching Abbot and Costello, which we did.
The following day was Sunday, July 4. Tom's relatives owned a piece of farmland, and so they ordered a couple of taxis to take us out to the property. We then walked to a scenic spot for our picnic.
It was a lovely 4th of July, a balmy sunny day, us sitting under the trees on a blanket in the grass, eating our sausages and bread and plums, cobbling together conversation from the few words we understood of each other's languages, laughing and laughing. Our hosts seemed unaware that this day was a special one for Americans, and neither Tom nor I had the vocabulary to explain to them about the significance of the July 4th and the Bicentennial.
And yet it felt kind of wonderful to me, to be there on that 4th of July, making new friends whose language, culture, and life experiences were so different from mine, and realizing that our differences really didn't make any difference. We could still come together and find plenty of common ground. Somehow it felt so American.
Happy 250th 4th of July, Everyone. May we all someday have friends the whole world over.

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What Lindsay Graham Never Had The Chance To Do

Why They Could Get Away With What Graham Platner Can't

​Why They Could Get Away With What Graham Platner Can't

My Bicentennial Story For America's 250th

​My Bicentennial Story For America's 250th

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Why They Could Get Away With What Graham Platner Can't

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