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Lest there was any confusion over precisely how villainous Senator Lindsey Graham really is, he put it in the clearest possible terms on Sunday when he proclaimed that Kentucky schoolchildren would benefit more from a border wall than they would from a new school.




“It’s better for the middle school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border. We’ll get them the school they need, but right now we’ve got a national emergency,” Graham said with a straight face on CBS’s Face the Nation.


To be clear, Kentucky is two states and a solid 1,000 miles away from the Mexico border. Graham knows that, and he also knows that Trump’s decision to rebrand his xenophobic tantrum as a national emergency is horseshit. In a past life, Graham was known for his occasional bipartisan tendencies, but he seems to have destroyed any trace of moderation in the feeble hope that it will somehow benefit him in 2020. Yuck.



Unfortunately for those middle schoolers, there’s very little fat to trim from Kentucky schools—as of 2018, the state ranks the 18th lowest in public school spending in the country.

Graham concludes the segment by insisting that the wall is an emergency because opioid addiction is “going through the roof in this country,” and that “we can’t control the flow of drugs into this country, and all of it’s coming across the border.”



No, again. While some drugs like heroin and fentanyl do enter the U.S. via foreign cartels, a large part of the problem is over-prescribing of opioids by U.S. doctors. As New York Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan said: “We didn’t develop an opioid epidemic until there was a huge surplus of opioids, which started with pharmaceutical drugs distributed legally.”




For Graham, that’s several blatant lies in just over a minute, which would be impressive if it weren’t so vile.

