There is a catchy summation to describe the libertarian ideology within its political circles. “Don’t hurt people, and don’t take their stuff.”
How Lindsey Graham fails to grasp libertarian beliefs at this point in his political career is baffling. Especially since his career has included an eight-year working relationship with libertarian Senator Rand Paul. It involved a number of occasions where the two have ideologically sparred.
Graham took to Twitter on Monday to blast former President Obama and current President Trump in the same breath. Along the way, he dragged the name of libertarianism through the mud.
Graham’s objections to the Trump Administration’s decision to pull out of Syria aside, he gets everything about libertarianism wrong.
Don’t Hurt People
The unconscionable winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama dropped almost 60,000 bombs in the Middle East in the 2015 and 2016 years of his presidency. In 2014, when Obama first launch his air-assault campaign, Iraq alone was receiving at least five airstrikes per day.
Additionally, it has been estimated that Obama’s airstrikes claimed as many as 2,200 to 3,400 civilian lives. By 2016, the White House only admitted to 64 of these.
Senator Graham has apparently forgotten that President Obama’s military approach included expanding war to five additional countries without authorization from Congress.
Where’s the Libertarianism?
There was nothing remotely resembling libertarianism in the Obama presidency.
If Lindsey Graham wants to have a legitimate discussion about whether or not Trump’s latest decision about Turkey and Syria falls into libertarian thought, that is one issue for discussion.
But for the Senator to outright conflate Obama’s legacy with that of libertarian thought is either a gross act of ignorance or an explicit act of malice.
