Lindsey Graham's Bloody Legacy

**Tommy Vietor** (0:13)
Welcome back to Pod Save the World, I'm Tommy Vietor.

**Ben Rhodes** (0:15)
I'm Ben Rhodes.

**Tommy Vietor** (0:16)
Ben, you've been riding a little high on the sports hog lately, so I wanted to read you a quote.
This is from former NFL receiver Plaxico Burris, comparing playing for the New York Jets to his time in prison. They're both kind of similar, because when I walked into prison on my first day, I was like, damn, man, you're a fucking loser. And I had the same feeling every day I walked through the door with the Jets.

**Ben Rhodes** (0:39)
I mean, loser would definitely apply.

**Tommy Vietor** (0:42)
This is a man who shot himself in the leg.

**Ben Rhodes** (0:43)
If I can sympathize with Plaxico Burris for a moment here, being a Jets fan is a bit like being in a lifelong prison sentence.

**Tommy Vietor** (0:52)
Yeah, of your own making.

**Ben Rhodes** (0:53)
You're sentenced to every time the NFL season rolls around, people like you probably have something to look forward to and people like me don't. Nothing to look forward to other than the next three seasons.

**Tommy Vietor** (1:04)
That was a mean quote. I just thought it was really funny. It's good, it's good. It's a really good quote.
We have a great show for you guys today. The executive producer of today's episode is a special one. It's Senator Lindsey Graham from the grave. I'm half kidding, Ben. Graham's funeral happened today in Washington. We record on Tuesday. For some reason, Lindsey Graham is being treated like a head of state.

**Ben Rhodes** (1:27)
It's very peculiar. I have thoughts, I've used on it.

**Tommy Vietor** (1:31)
Yeah.
We'll get to it. But both Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is here for the funeral, and also Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. They're both in town to attend the funeral, and then they're meeting with Trump, so that kind of combines our top stories. I get why both of them would show their respects to Graham, because he's been a supporter of US military support to both. I still don't get why it's like a bigger set of festivities than Jimmy Carter seemingly got.

**Ben Rhodes** (1:56)
Well, both wars came to town, and there's nothing that Lindsey Graham liked more than war. There's actually a real comment, I mean, I mentioned this to you, that I guess if you just support all the wars, you get booked on every single television show imaginable, and you get a state funeral.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:20)
That is seemingly what's happened.

**Ben Rhodes** (2:21)
It does suggest that the one remaining sheen of bipartisan whatever in Washington is like we celebrate the people that support the wars. It's kind of not a great commentary.

**Tommy Vietor** (2:35)
Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right.
All right, we're gonna cover the latest from Iran, which one of the wars that Graham helped us get into. We'll talk about the latest from Ukraine, including this head spinning pivot by a right wing commentator named Laura Loomer, who went from being one of President Zelensky's biggest haters to now a huge fan and advocate on behalf of Ukraine. Something just been confusing to watch. We'll try to unpack it, figure out what's going on there. Then we're gonna update you guys on a major protest movement in India called the Cockroach Protests.
We'll talk about some updates from Venezuela, including questions about where all of Venezuela's oil revenue went, its relationship with the International Criminal Court, the ongoing US policy of murdering people in boats off the coast of Venezuela or in the Caribbean or in the Pacific. We're gonna talk about China in AI, because there have been some major developments in AI generally, but also with respect to China's development of frontier AI models. Then we're gonna do some quicker updates on reports of possible US counter-terrorism efforts in Mali, and then the horrendous wildfires in France and Spain. And then Ben, you did our interview today. Who did you talk to?

**Ben Rhodes** (3:41)
I talked to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. He has a piece in the latest issue of The New Yorker, profiling Gadi Eisenkot, who's the chief opponent running against Netanyahu in the October elections. Really great piece.
I learned a lot about Eisenkot, his backstory, what he's running on. So we talked a lot about the election Netanyahu and Eisenkot, but we also then had a bit of a debate about just how far gone Israel is politically, how likely or not likely it is that Israel will actually reckon with what's happened in Gaza in particular. Really I mean it's a long interview. I encourage people to check it out because we really kind of debated and went back and forth on a whole range of issues that you and I talk on this podcast a lot and David's obviously been in Israel probably hundreds of times so I had a lot of thoughts on this.