By Ira Katz
July 15, 2026
In September of 2025 when President Trump was attacking Thomas Massie I wrote Donald Trump Is a Putz!. "The one thing that Trump could actually accomplish to make the US and the world at large a better place is to root out the neoconservative war mongers from the Republican party and national discourse." I noted in this article that Trump does the opposite, and he had been a traitor to his supporters' America First agenda by supporting the neocons. "Perhaps the worst case is his support of Senator Lindsey Graham (new emphasis), the dumbest and most destructive, who will wreck Trump's presidency on the way to world war." As Graham (along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) was the whisperer in Trump's ear that made him decide to attack Iran and continue the Ukraine fiasco, I think my comment was spot on.
The death of the senator has triggered new reflections for me on the nature of evil, Graham and the neocons. What was the source of Graham's blood lust ? Ancient conquering pagans instinctively used their physical power for gain and glory, perhaps with some of the natural behavior of an animal predator. Crusaders and jihadists fought for glory and God. Even communists, fascists, and Nazis who played out long and deep resentments into murderous crimes are plausible. In their perverse ways I can comprehend all of this historical blood lust. But why since the fall of communism, when real world peace seemed so tangible, was it necessary to have continuous neocon war ? Could it be just for profit?
Graham did have a long career in military service, always as a lawyer, very far from combat. In what seems to me as the height of irony, during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, Graham was recalled to active duty, serving as a judge advocate helping to "brief departing pilots on the laws of war." In 2014, Graham received a Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service as a senior legal adviser to the Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan from August 2009 to July 2014, overseeing the detention of military prisoners. But for me there is nothing in his Wiki biography, no trauma for instance, to account for his continuous calls, in every theater, for the most violent solutions to all international disputes.
In literature I think of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It "follows the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former law student in Saint Petersburg who plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who stores money and valuable objects in her flat. He theorises that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds, and seeks to convince himself that certain crimes are justifiable if they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals of"extraordinary"men."
It is conceivable to me that Graham and his neocon colleagues do think of themselves as extraordinary men who have every right to have removed by US military violence all of the human obstacles that attempt to remain independent of their domination.
Perhaps more pertinent is the real life story of the murderous couple Leopold and Loeb. "Leopold and Loeb, both students at the University of Chicago, were respectively aged 19 and 18 and were engaged in a relationship at the time of their crime. They committed the murder - characterized at the time as"the crime of the century"- hoping to demonstrate superior intellect, which they believed enabled and entitled them to carry out a"perfect crime"without consequences." "The Franks murder has inspired works of film, theatre and fiction, some of which imply the homosexual nature of the perpetrators' relationship without stating it outright. These works include the 1929 play Rope by Patrick Hamilton, and Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name in 1948."
Leopold and Loeb
One must admit Graham was a master politician. He kept being reelected in South Carolina despite having no apparent concern for the citizens of the state. Was his career of fomenting death and destruction simply an amusement for his superior intellect?