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Lindsey Graham Compared Himself To Lohan

by Alicia Lu

On Monday, Lindsey Graham thrust himself into the national spotlight when he announced his candidacy for the Republican primary, and now all kinds of delicious details about the South Carolina senator are coming out of the woodwork. Besides the fact that he's the only bachelor running for president, it's recently come to light that Graham's Twitter game is strong. Earlier this month, before he had announced his candidacy, Lindsey Graham compared himself to Lindsay Lohan on Twitter. Unbeknownst to all of us, he had straight-up slayed the platform and we've all been tossing empty words into a cyberspace pit since then because nothing else will matter ever again after that Lohan comparison.

It all started with a BuzzFeed article. On May 18, BuzzFeed posted a quiz titled "Who Is Lindsey Graham?" One might expect it to be a straightforward profile of the senator, but the subtitle read "I'm asking you. Do you know?" Pegged to his presumed presidential bid, the quiz then asked readers to select who Lindsey Graham was out of four choices: a picture of singer Lindsey Buckingham, a picture of graham crackers, a picture of Lindsay Lohan, and finally, a picture of the real Lindsey Graham.

In response to the quiz, rather than be offended by its implication that Graham is virtually unknown, Graham took the article into his own hands and spun Twitter gold with it. On May 22, Graham tweeted this:

The best part of the tweet, besides the fact that it exists, is that he actually tweeted at Lohan. So I'd like to imagine that when her phone chimed with the notification, she read the tweet, felt sheer confusion for a few seconds, shrugged, and went back to smoking a cigarette and looking at YouTube compilations of Zac Efron's shirtless scenes.

While the Lohan tweet may be an outlier in Graham's normally serious Twitter feed, it wasn't the first time he's caused a chuckle, whether intentionally or otherwise. Graham has been known to spout some pretty unconventional wisdom.

In 2013, he opposed regulations on assault weapons at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting by describing a Mad Max-type world in which families would be safer armed with AR-15s.

Let me give an example. That you have a lawless environment where you have a natural disaster or some catastrophic event and those things, unfortunately, do happen. And law and order breaks down because the police can’t travel, there’s no communication. And there are armed gangs roaming around neighborhoods. Can you envision a situation where if your home happens to be in the cross-hairs of this group that a better self-defense weapon may be a semiautomatic AR-15 versus a double-barrel shotgun?

He may or may not have watched I Am Legend the night before.

Win McNamee/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Sounding like a fledgling rapper from your hometown, Graham had this to say about President Obama's foreign policy comments during his 2014 State of the Union Address:

The world is literally about to blow up.
AFP/AFP/Getty Images

And sometimes Graham's comments are not outrageous in a ha-ha kind of way. In 2013, the senator had some very harsh words on Hillary Clinton, telling Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that "Hillary Clinton got away with murder" for her role in the Benghazi attack.

Regardless of your political views and whether or not you agree with his, one thing is for sure: the road to 2016 just got a little less boring with Graham in the race.

Images: Getty Images (2)