Maybe he was being nice. If so, he needs to stop.
When President Trump endorsed Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline Graham Nardone as Graham’s replacement after his death, there were grumblings. When she announced she would run in the special election to fill out Graham’s term, rather than simply serving as an interim seat-filler, those got louder.
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And now that Nardone is in a runoff with Ralph Norman, a House Freedom Caucus member serving in Congress since 2017 and a highly successful real estate developer before that, there really couldn’t be a more stark comparison between the two.
Last night there was a debate, and this happened…
No, you don’t get points for being “honest,” Darline. This was about as disqualifying an answer as it’s possible to give.
The China-Taiwan issue isn’t a hard question to answer. Norman was given a chance to answer it and his response was utterly low-energy but 100 percent adequate — China has to be deterred from taking Taiwan, as our trade relationship with the Taiwanese, particularly with respect to computer chips made there, is of huge importance, and that Trump has done a good job dissuading the ChiComs from making their move.
Norman could have gone much further, and probably should have. He could have said taking down Nicolás Maduro and blockading Iran’s oil exports, not to mention disrupting China’s control over the Panama Canal and the recent moves to put the U.S. Navy directly in control of the Malacca Strait, are all major elements of that deterrence. China is faced with a severe and likely debilitating oil shortage the minute we decide to impose it, and that gives Taiwan more assurance than anything else we could offer short of parking a couple of carrier groups in the South China Sea (which we will not do).
But the point was that with virtually zero effort, Norman was able to give a standard Republican answer on that subject.
And Nardone didn’t even try to answer it.
You’re Lindsey Graham’s sister, for crying out loud. Whatever opinions you may have had about Lindsey Graham, and people have oodles of those, it was incontestable that Lindsey Graham knew as much or more about foreign policy and world events as anybody in American politics. And NONE of that transferred to his sister with whom he was joined at the hip? (RELATED: Senator Lindsey Graham: American Icon)
Then exactly what is it that you bring to the table, Darline?
It didn’t help that later in the debate she claimed that South Carolina’s population was 50 million people, which would make it more populous than California and almost as loaded with souls as Florida and Texas combined. So not only is foreign policy not her thing but basic U.S. geography isn’t a strength, either.
I’m sure she’s a nice lady. I bear her no ill will. And I’m not one of these people who have it in for all of the Grahams because Lindsey was a neocon who couldn’t wait to go to war with everybody. He wasn’t always wrong about that (though mostly he was). And while I was not a Lindsey Graham fan, I will give him credit for one thing — Lindsey Graham was, above all, a politician who aimed to please, and it was pretty rare for him to take a position that most of his constituents disagreed with.
His private life was… none of my business. Perhaps he was compromised by it. I don’t have evidence of that, and as such I’m simply not going to judge based on rumors and suspicions. Lindsey Graham was a mixed bag.
Nardone is the sister of the Senate’s big foreign policy expert, and she won’t even try to answer a basic question about one of the most important foreign policy issues of our time?
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But a U.S. Senate seat is not a fiefdom. This is not a landed title. It’s a job. A pretty important one, actually, and at the moment it’s a job in an institution which desperately needs an infusion of competence and verve.
Norman has demonstrated for a decade that he passes that test. He’s been an excellent congressman. Nardone is the sister of the Senate’s big foreign policy expert, and she won’t even try to answer a basic question about one of the most important foreign policy issues of our time?
And somehow this is OK?
We are in an abyss of standards throughout the West. We’re watching DSA communists who are assets, if not agents, of foreign terrorist organizations or enemy regimes taking over one of our two main political parties, Cambridge University, previously thought to be one of the top dozen or so institutions of higher learning on earth, is now shattered due to the exploits of a DEI fabulist and plagiarizer who is now a martyr after killing himself rather than facing the accountability of a public alerted to his lies. And a woman who has admitted slaughtering her three children is being held forth as a sympathetic figure, if not a victim of a frame-up her own defense lawyer is not asserting, based on a surge of mommy-sleuth TikTokers and conspiracy clowns. (RELATED: Cambridge Professor Commits Suicide After DEI Scandal)
One is tempted to call for the commitment to psychiatric hospitals every new mother diagnosed with post-partum depression, for fear that since women are apparently not capable of controlling their filicidal urges, an entire generation is now at risk of being murdered.
This after there is still an entire movement attempting to exonerate or justify Karmelo Anthony’s murder of Austin Metcalf because the latter “disrespected” the former for trying to chase him out of a tent he didn’t have any business being in. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 429: Karmelo Anthony Trial Is a Race-Baiting Scandal)
In all of these cases, it’s the people calling out the bad behavior, rank incompetence, and atrocious results who are being demonized.
Who will strike a blow for higher standards? Will anyone? And can’t we at least start with this Senate seat in South Carolina?
Darline Graham isn’t qualified for that seat. It’s pure nepotism, and not competence, skill, or knowledge, which puts her in a position to hold it for a single day, much less the rest of her brother’s term.
The honorable thing would be for her to drop out of the race and endorse Norman. Doing so would at least uphold the standard that we’re going to try to give the most important political jobs in the free world to people who at least have average insight into current affairs.
Will we get that? No. Not in this stupid age where standards are racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted and the entitled go on about their business with no regard for the results of their entitlement.
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