Lest you’ve been wintering in Antarctica, here’s what’s lately been learned about Platner, the 41-year-old combat veteran and oyster farmer:
That his wife had told a campaign aide that he had been trading sexually explicit messages with six women, and perhaps as many as a dozen, before the beginning of his political run. That a former girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, alleges that he lied when he claimed he did not know a chest tattoo he had gotten during his military service strongly resembled an official insignia of the Nazi SS, and that he had once referred to it as “my Totenkopf.” That Fifield also alleges that he had once “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out” and that she later described him as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth.” That she said he referred to women as “hatchet wounds,” using a crude word for female genitalia. That other women romantically connected to Platner also described unsettling behavior.
Fifield also told The Times this: “He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” adding that he told her it would be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way. He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.”
Disqualifying? Platner has rejected some of the allegations and acknowledged others, all the while trying to put them in the context of the emotionally turbulent period amid and after multiple deployments. OK, uh-huh, maybe.
Less OK is to watch some of the same progressives who thought that Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged misbehavior as a teenager and a college student made him unfit for the Supreme Court suddenly become dismissive of the allegations against Platner. “Seems like a lot of nothing,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who once thundered over the meaning of the word “ralph” in Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook. Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also been notably agnostic when it comes to the charges against their Maine favorite. What ever happened to #BelieveWomen?
The term for this is “double standard,” if not outright hypocrisy, and among the consequences is that it merely fuels the pervasive national cynicism about any moral judgments made about any political leader. If Platner can pass muster among Democratic primary voters, then the differences between him and Donald Trump are mainly of degree, not of kind. You may still agree with Platner’s politics, and if you’re in Maine, you may still think he’s a better choice than Collins.
