Lindsey Graham Figures Charleston Shooter Must Be Some Kind Of Ay-Rab, Somehow

Lindsey Graham is one of those people who lives out that old line about how when every problem looks like a nail, you turn dumb as a bag of hammers. Consider his brilliant observation in the Senate Wednesday on the murders in Charleston, in which he decided that the only possible explanation for Dylann Roof's actions had to be that he was not even an American kind of killer. 

I don't know how you can sit with somebody for an hour in a church and pray with them and get up and shoot them. That's Mideast hate. That's something I didn't think we had here but apparently we do. I just can't imagine what it takes of an individual to be welcomed into a church -- and here's what happened: He went to Charleston with a plan. The people in the church had no idea who he was or what he had in mind, and he came into the church and was sitting in the pews by himself, and they invited him up for the Bible study, and spent an hour with him. And he said, "They were so nice, I could've almost backed out." That says a lot about them. Says a lot about him.

Apparently, it says he's some kind of Mideasterner, because American boys just don't do that. Except that they do. And Lindsey Graham knows stuff -- he's been "more right than wrong" when it comes to foreign policy, you know.

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Sen. Graham does have that little problem where everything looks like Islamic terrorism to him; a few weeks ago, he said that "everything that starts with 'Al' in the Middle East is bad news." Apparently, the foreign policy expert was never briefed on the detail that "al" is Arabic for "the." Don't be too surprised if he starts calling the Charleston killer "Dylann al-Roof."

Sane people know that ignoring the humanity of one's targeted victims is a routine part of every terrorist's mindset, regardless of ideology. Tim McVeigh didn't think of the office workers and children in the Murrah building as actual people; they were part of the evil Federal Government, and their deaths were of little consequence to his great cause. Same thing for the Klansmen who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963: Those weren't four little girls with families they killed, they were merely obstacles in the way of keeping the South white.

We'd have reminded Sen. Graham of those two acts of very American terror, and many others, but we're worried his eyes would light up as he realized that Arab terrorists just love blowing up buildings with innocent people in them. And then he and John McCain would start looking for some places in South Carolina to launch airstrikes. 

[ TPM ]