South Carolina Senate Race: Jay Stamper vs Lindsey Graham

Jay Stamper is the Democratic candidate for Senate in South Carolina and he's running against Lindsey Graham-- or whoever the Tea Party replaces Graham with in an increasingly bitter and contentious Republican primary. Blue America endorsed Jay and he needs your help, not just to help fund his grassroots campaign, but to help to send a message to Graham and John McCain that the people of the United States will not be scared and stampeded into agreeing to an unnecessary and illegitimate war. We asked Jay to give us a rundown on how the battle over attacking Syria looks from a South Carolina perspective.

Lindsey Graham is pushing the same old tried-and-true rhetoric to try to scare us into agreeing to an unnecessary and illegitimate war. He wants us to believe that Assad's recent chemical weapons attack on Syria's own citizens is a prelude to an attack against the national interests of the United States.

According to a recent article in the US News and World Report, Graham said that “...if we get Syria wrong, within six months-- and you can quote me on this-- there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program.” Lindsey Graham is beating the drum for war, and he will say almost anything to pull the United States into another war in the Middle East.

Syria has no nuclear weapons, and no prospect of getting them any time soon. Also, Syria cannot reach the United States with its Soviet-era SCUD and OTR-21 Tochka missiles. They have no means of delivering a weapon-- nuclear or otherwise-- to any territory of the United States. In short, Assad's totalitarian regime, however criminal or misguided, is not a legitimate threat to the United States.

This inconvenient truth caught up with Graham recently. At a Republican breakfast, when confronted, he got creative. The story Graham created-- and actually expected the American people to believe-- was that the real threat from Syria, “... won’t come to America on top of a missile, it’ll come in the belly of a ship in the Charleston or New York harbor.”

Really Lindsey? So Syria, a country without nuclear weapons, is going to pick a fight with the United States by sneaking a nuclear weapon past our defenses and into the ports of Charleston or New York? Unbelievable.

Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain want us to use military force to “change the momentum on the ground.” This means helping the rebels, some of whom are allied with Islamist terrorist networks such as Al-Queda. Military intervention to change the momentum on the ground would give legitimacy to the guerrilla movements of terrorist groups. At the end of this conflict, these groups would treat us the same way the Mujahedin did in Afghanistan: they would use our own arms, methods, and money to wage guerrilla war on the United States.

Who really wins when Lindsey gets his way? Defense contractors. This is why many of the biggest federal defense contractors donate to Lindsey Graham. Graham is one of the most consistent advocates for military intervention. And what is worse? Graham would spend a lot of your tax money waging an illegitimate war, but this is a small fraction of your money that he would spend rebuilding a demolished Syria.

Our nation is still emerging from two wars and an economic depression. We have spent $1.4 trillion over the last ten years waging costly overseas wars in the Middle East. Rather than getting engaged in another military intervention that could expand into another full-scale conflict in the Middle East, we should focus our efforts on rebuilding our own country first. While the use of chemical weapons is a crime against the people of Syria and a violation of our modern rules of war, Assad did not attack the United States. We should not get involved with the Syrian civil war.

Help me send a message to Washington DC so that the career politicians there understand that the United States should not choose sides in a civil war when there are no “good guys.” I need your help to remind Washington DC that our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines deserve better than to be put in harm's way for profit or for the re-election of a career politician.

Jay is an independent-minded progressive Democratic voice in South Carolina. He's working hard on a grassroots level to change the political dynamic in his state. We don't know if he will beat Lindsey Graham. We do know that he is working at it everyday-- and that he's doing it with turning himself into a Republican-lite Democrat. He deserves our help. If you can, please give him a hand at the Blue America Senate ActBlue page.