This might help? Or not. Either way, I was promised a pee tape too.
This has been widely known forever, right? Why are people suddenly talking about it this week? It's all kind of uncomfortable and I don't know what to think. If he were a member of a functioning political party that wasn't run by a Russian asset then maybe he would have been pressured to resign when the US government found out that Russia had him compromised.
I think the new part is that it might be about to explode into the public sphere.
Right, but why is it about to blow into the public sphere now? I've had similar questions about news stories for the past couple of years. Like for weeks everybody in the media will go along not noticing Trump is a shit and then he does something bad and it blows up. Usually, it's not clear why that bad thing is worse that last week's bad thing that everybody just didn't notice.
Graham's behavior is obviously that of someone caught on the end of a short chain. Consistent with my highly successful heuristic, whereby everything is much more like it appears to be than what you might think is possible, I firmly believe that trump or someone close by has highly embarrassing information on Graham and all of the rumors are true and more.
I think I need a new term of endearment for my lady.
This has been widely known forever, right?
No?
I heard it, maybe here? I don't know where.
It hadn't quite occurred to me that Graham might be being blackmailed!
4: apparently a former escort is making pronouncements or something.
It's probably not a bad time for Graham, assuming "Never" wasn't an option. People always tried to bury stuff by waiting until end of the work day on Friday and there's so much happening otherwise to distract.
It started with gay porn star Sean Harding tweeting this
There is a homophobic republican senator who is no better than Trump who keeps passing legislation that is damaging to the lgbt and minority communities. Every sex worker I know has been hired by this man. Wondering if enough of us spoke out if that could get him out of office?
https://twitter.com/SeanHardingXXX/status/1268672970265964547
It started with gay porn star Sean Harding tweeting this
There is a homophobic republican senator who is no better than Trump who keeps passing legislation that is damaging to the lgbt and minority communities. Every sex worker I know has been hired by this man. Wondering if enough of us spoke out if that could get him out of office?
https://twitter.com/SeanHardingXXX/status/1268672970265964547
Not about escorts, or that they call him Lady G. I don't remember where I saw it, but years ago, I read the claim that Lindsey Graham is an archetype of a southern queen, including the cutting remarks and the humor. And I was all, huh. I'm not in those scenes enough to evaluate that, but I'll keep it as a possibility.
That's all I've ever known or thought about it. We're supposed to be against outing, but I wouldn't feel bad about this one.
It deserved to be repeated.
It seems so obvious that something like this must be true, but then some spoilsport like Saiselgy will point out that Lindsey Graham is extremely vulnerable to a primary from the right and that is a completely plausible explanation for his behavior.
It deserved to be repeated.
It seems so obvious that something like this must be true, but then some spoilsport like Saiselgy will point out that Lindsey Graham is extremely vulnerable to a primary from the right and that is a completely plausible explanation for his behavior.
It deserved to be repeated.
It seems so obvious that something like this must be true, but then some spoilsport like Saiselgy will point out that Lindsey Graham is extremely vulnerable to a primary from the right and that is a completely plausible explanation for his behavior.
Sorry! It's too late for me to be posting.
Isn't "every sex worker I know" going to be really expensive?
That Graham is gay has been "known" thing for more than a decade. No idea what this latest is about.
Lots of sex workers. Pay attention.
Anyway, Jerry Springer got his start on a post-politics career by paying a sex worker with a check.
Since paying for sex is illegal in the U.S. (mostly), what does that mean for the non-disclosure agreements that twitter says are causing various people to be reluctant to come forward? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure you can't make somebody sign away their rights to testify to something illegal they saw. Obviously, the sex workers would be confessing to a crime, but usually selling is less of a crime than buying and also they aren't senators.
19 has me laughing.
12 That's some twitter thread
||
Gulf Menhadens are small fish known to accumulate in ships' sea strainers and cause loss or reduction in propulsion, reduced manoeuvrability, and loss of water pressure within the firefighting system.|>
That's Mossy, no doubt, catching up on the latest issue of the Hellenic Shipping News.
I just don't see how firefighting will be less effective for spraying the fire with fishes as well.
You don't spray fishes at a fire, you broil them over it.
Graham is up for re-election for the first time in 6 years, people are mad as hell, and the SC primary is in 3 days. I think that explains the timing.
Am quite sure that Trump has all the dirt on Graham that the FBI has been collecting for years. Don't all incoming presidents have access to that information? Just as the Obama administration knew Flynn was a problem/potential target for Russian blackmail, the NSA would alert Trump about anyone who could be compromised.
24: I've never understood how NDA agreements weren't illegal due to their being contrary to public policy, But Harvey Weinstein clearly used them for years to prevent people from testifying to his illegal activity.
30.1 is certainly more than plausible.
30.2 is not. Why would the FBI or the NSA be collecting dirt related to Graham's sexual proclivities? That's not how they work (and it's illegal, go ahead, laugh, I know). Whereas Flynn got on the radar because he was conspiring with the Russian ambassador. OTOH, Trump has a direct line to the National Enquirer and I'm sure they have all the dirt he would need on Graham.
32.2: That has to be it. I never thought about the National Enquirer connection.
33: Yes. I assumed the Enquirer was the route. And Graham's tune did change quite abruptly after a golf outing with Trump. But I still think Graham's natural toadying instincts are still the primary driver for his behavior. Multiple causation who knew?
I'm trying to turn myself into a person who believes in un-nuanced explanations, so I am going to go with lumpkin's "everything is much more like it appears to be than what you might think is possible", and go with the "blackmail" explanation. Graham was never the level of toady he is now, and he clearly hated Trump before.
This has been widely known forever, right?
I'm on Twitter too much, and I didn't know. (I think I had a vague idea Graham was closeted, and there was lots of talk about his abrupt shift, but I didn't get those two things connected - nothing about sex workers, in particular.)
I have no memory of any tell-all person ever mentioning that blackmail is one of Trump's tools. I think he's so mono-modal that he lacks the duplicity for blackmail. As in, photo ops in front of a church is his best effort at an intentional lie, and the vast majority of his lies come from his reptilian instinctive brain. His lies are all improvisation, in other words, not script.
So it's not plausible to me at the moment that Trump would take Graham out on a golf course and let him know that he had dirt on him. Now, if Michael Flynn or anyone else was on the golf course to serve as an intermediary to Russia, it becomes more plausible to me.
32: The FBI has a long history of collecting dirt on people like Martin Luther King -
"the FBI anonymously sent King a compromising tape recording of him carousing in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, along with an anonymous letter that SCLC staff interpreted as encouraging King to commit suicide to avoid public embarrassment (Senate Select Committee, 167)."
What is the law that makes this kind of surveillance illegal? - asking sincerely, NAL.
I have no memory of any tell-all person ever mentioning that blackmail is one of Trump's tools. I think he's so mono-modal that he lacks the duplicity for blackmail.
Not him personally; the implication of a lot of reporting over the past few years has been that more informed/capable allies like David Pecker (Enquirer/AMI) do it on his behalf, knowing he will happily take the help.
32: The nice explanation for the FBI investigating compromising intel on folk like Lindsey Graham is so that they know how vulnerable he is to blackmail.
One could easily imagine a Trump administration using the cover story of "investigating potential corruption" to turn over a lot of rocks in search of dirt on allies and enemies alike. This Justice Department wouldn't even blink.
38.1 that was over 50 years ago. Major reforms were instituted by congress as a result of the Church committee. Also MLK was a civil rights movement leader regarded by the establishment as an agitator, Graham is a United States Senator of the party in power. Why would they be looking at him for his sexual activities?
40.1 Again, Graham is an elected member of the US Senate, not a political appointee or a civil servant in working in a sensitive national security/intelligence area.
41: I'm not a historian of the FBI, but doesn't it seem like a lot of the institutional vigor behind COINTELPRO got channeled into stings? Practically every big terrorism case they've made in the last 20 years seems to be the result, not of shoe-leather gumshoe work, but because they've got agents out waving bomb materials under the nose of any far-right or far-left or radical Islamic numpty they can find. 90% of those cases wouldn't have actually led to a successful attack of any kind. Presumably they're also a little smarter about not following unsigned notes that say "Please leave this door unlocked tonight" as well, so there's plenty of stuff we never hear about.
42 Oh definitely, I think a lot of those Islamic terrorism busts were due to entrapment. They'd take someone, maybe already radicalized but not yet inclined to bomb anyone and without the knowledge or skills required to acquire the materials for a device, much less build one, and goad them, give them instructions, and access to the necessary materiel.
41 I doubt if the FBI cares about Graham's sex life, and I believe that prostitution should be legal. But it is not in D.C. or in South Carolina. That makes him a target for blackmail.
If some foreign power set up a honey trap and baited it with a young, underage boy, just to compromise Graham, I would want the NSA to care about how they might use that information. You are right that they (the FBI and the NSA) give way more deference to a powerful white Senator than they do to any Black civil rights activist, and perhaps they no longer collect dirt; but I think they'd want to know if the dirt is out there. If you think Trump is too honorable to ever use something like that to his own advantage I would respectfully suggest that is a misunderstanding of his character.
Law enforcement agencies are empowered to spy on people getting sex from massage parlors - wasn't that what happened to the Patriot's owner? If prostitution were legal and regulated there would be a lot less sex trafficking of poor, desperate immigrants, and law enforcement could turn their attention to investigating the criminals in their own ranks.
But in all of this the timing seems suspicious. All this effort to "out" Graham's participation in prostitution started shortly before the SC primary; it's a late October "surprise" arriving in late May.
41.2 Graham is the chairman of the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs and the Chair of the Subcommittee on Judiciary that deals with crime and terrorism. I think that makes him a civil servant (if you believe, as I do, that he is a federal employee and should answer to the public) who has access to all sorts of classified intelligence.
40.1 Right.
40.2 The Justice Department under Bill Barr is a travesty.
47: I have no memory of any tell-all person ever mentioning that blackmail is one of Trump's tools.
I don't think blackmail per se, but I do think some of the Michael Cohen stuff was a pretty good glimpse into his his style on that front. Which is generally in the "troublesome priest" stuff. So my bet for LG it was a mix of vague reminders of electoral truths (Graham up in 2020 and a Trump-backed primary challenger likely to easily defeat Graham), and maybe some coded hints or mention of Pecker/Enquirer material.
I do go sometimes recall that there are credible reports that the Russians hacked some GOP emails but did not release. And Trump does not necessarily know what is in them, but Graham (and other Republicans certainly do, but most likely to be politically inconvenient stuff rather than this kind of "scandalous" stuff).
So I'm guessing a lot left to Graham's imagination,which he credibly assessed as definite threat of political doom.
I'm not going to look it up, because LG, but he was/is a reserve USAF officer while in Congress, so straddling branches.
Trump doesn't strike me as having the self-discipline for blackmail. You'd always have to worry that he'd just blurt out whatever it was you were paying him to conceal.
44.2 Certainly if that were to happen and the NSA picked up on it I'm sure they would notify the FBI, and Graham. I don't think there's any reason to believe that's what's going on here.
We're supposed to be against outing, but I wouldn't feel bad about this one.
Who is we, kemosabe? Outing is not that straightforward on a good/bad axis.
We're supposed to be against outing, but I wouldn't feel bad about this one.
Who is "we," kemosabe? Outing is not that straightforward on the good/bad axis.
That thing were you get a weird screen that says "your comment cannot be posted because you have commented too frequently" or something and so you try again and toss in an edit and of course it posted the first one.
It's better with the quotation marks.
I'm feeling really naive, but how is being gay a blackmail-able thing in 2020? I get it historically. But the conservative/evangelicals are willing to accept even Trump as lord and savior so I don't see why Graham wouldn't deny it until he found a way to blame it on the liberals, and then repent and be re-elected.
Maybe he wants to keep seeing rent boys after the election?
Like, obviously, I'm wrong, but I keep imagining this sort of like Dr. Evil's plan to demand one million dollars. "Yuri, what kompromat do you have on the American Senator?" "Sergei, he is gay." "yes, and the kompromat?" "Uh, he also inhaled once?"
I think you're just going to have accept that Senator Graham is so sexually innovative that America isn't ready for him.
In Fifty Shades of Grey when the rich, bland, sadist says, "I don't make love, I fuck. Hard." I think we need to infer that Graham can say that and nobody will laugh.
54: I mean, he goes to the trouble of staying in the closet for some reason.
Practically every big terrorism case they've made in the last 20 years seems to be the result, not of shoe-leather gumshoe work, but because they've got agents out waving bomb materials under the nose of any far-right or far-left or radical Islamic numpty they can find.
This doesn't sound like entirely a bad thing if it creates a massive amount of uncertainty and fear among the numpty community that anyone offering to help them with blowing up office buildings is probably an FBI provocateur. That's similar to how the IRA ended up being beaten, in part - there were so many security force agents in the IRA that the organisation spent most of its time trying to find agents, or torturing and killing people they thought were agents, or worrying about being tortured and killed because someone thought they were an agent. (And of course the head of the IRA's special 'squad for torturing and killing people we think are security force agents' was himself a security force agent, which didn't help.)
Or indeed all those weird vigilante TV shows you have where people run stings for child abusers.
But the conservative/evangelicals are willing to accept even Trump as lord and savior so I don't see why Graham wouldn't deny it until he found a way to blame it on the liberals, and then repent and be re-elected.
But the Trump loyalists aren't on LG's side any more. Trump has turned against him. Graham's only chance is to hope there are enough of the primary electorate for whom "morality" (their peculiar version thereof, which mainly means not being gay) is more important than loyalty.
And 44.4 is right that this is a primary thing, so the fact that for the general population being gay is OK these days doesn't matter. It is less OK among the SC primary electorate.
how is being gay a blackmail-able thing in 2020?
Merritt Corrigan knows the answer to that one.
When did Trump turn against Lindsey Graham, and why? I must have missed something.
Trump has endorsed LG. a quick google shows. And why not, he's certain to win the primary, isn't he?
60: I don't think Trump has turned against Graham, I think this attempt to out him may be from Republicans running against him in the primary - one of them is all about "alignment to God's moral law" and kinder küche kirche.
61: That would be my prediction. It's tomorrow, so we'll know soon enough.
60: didn't he? I thought he'd been tweeting all kinds of insults about him. Sorry.
64: The list of possible candidates is very long.
Sessions! That's who I was thinking of. Sorry about that everyone.