Lindsey Graham’s recent denunciation of the word “the” shows why policy formation can be so hard in today’s Republican Party.
Maybe the campaign trail just brings it out in people, or maybe Lindsey Graham is just a silly person, but whatever the reason the Republican Senator from South Carolina said a very strange thing during a recent American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) meeting. According to investigative journalist Uri Blau here’s what he had to say:
“Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula… Everything that starts with ‘Al’ in the Middle East is bad news” – these were Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina words at an AIPAC New England Leadership Dinner in Boston‘s Convention Center last night.
Why is that silly? Well because the word “Al” in the Arabic language is the indefinite article, that is it means the word “the”. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it:
The problem—linguistically—with Graham’s comment is that “Al” is the definite article in Arabic (i.e. equivalent to English’s “the”), and usually appears before most Arabic proper nouns, especially place and personal names.
It’s even worse than that though, as Matt Yglesias pointed out at Vox math too might be the enemy as well, “This is also the derivation of the English word algebra (from al-jabr, the reunion of broken parts).”
Joking aside though this does illustrate a real problem that the national Republican Party seems to have these days with formatting substantive policies to deal with real issues. After all there are all sorts of substantive critiques one could make about President Obama’s foreign policy, or the foreign policy of Democrats in general, raising concern about the word “the” is not one of them.
Furthermore it’s not like Graham is some random guy slamming his beer down on the bar and shouting, “you know what the Middle East needs?” No, he’s a United States Senator who appears to be running for president, and yet when asked to come up with something substantive to say about foreign affairs to a room full of political power brokers he can do little more than crack a joke about the names of things in the Middle East.
It’s like John Boehner boasting about how George W. Bush would have protected Ukraine by punching Putin in the nose.
These sorts of things make for great fun when it comes to political commentary, but in all honesty it should be conservatives and Republicans who are most upset over this sort of nonsense. Graham almost certainly won’t win the nomination this cycle, but another Republican will and that person might very well be in the White House in 2017. Do they want someone who will try to substantively engage with issues like the rise of ISIS, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, political turmoil in Egypt, or any other major issue you’d care to substitute, or do they want someone who declares war on the word “the?”
It’s a serious question that Republicans should be addressing right now, while they still have time to influence who the nominee is going to be. The last time they picked the guy they’d rather have a beer with and ignored policy positions it didn’t turn out so well for their party or their country.
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Photo by Charlie Neibergall/AP