The Leopards Eating People's Faces Party wishes to confirm, with its customary regret, that Senator Lindsey Graham's face has been eaten — and to note, for the record, that Senator Graham catered the meal himself.
As analyst Chuck Todd observed this week, Graham was never principally a man of principles. He was principally a man of rooms. The specific deed in question is not a single vote or a single endorsement but a decades-long operating posture: the serial subordination of stated conviction to whoever currently held the largest gravitational field in American politics. Graham fed the leopards McCain-flavored ideology, then Trump-flavored ideology, then whatever the room required. The leopards, being leopards, ate all of it — and then, following the platform to the letter, ate the hand that kept refilling the bowl.
The result, as Todd frames it, is a career that ends somewhere near the center of every debate it ever entered, and nowhere near any of them. Relevance was the product Graham optimized for. Relevance is the product that has now expired on the shelf. The Party notes this is precisely the yield one should expect when relevance is purchased with principles as the currency.
We extend our customary sympathy to the face. We have no plans to revisit the platform. The leopards performed exactly as described in all pre-enrollment documentation, and the Party remains committed to the eating of faces on a strictly non-partisan, opportunity-equal basis.