Wednesday's Final Word

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I met a tabbing woman, she took my heart away ...

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Ed: Arrogant to the end. Platner didn’t lead a movement; he hasn’t added one original thought to politics. He answered a casting call and assumed a false narrative as a working-class stiff on behalf of DSA provocateurs. In no way is Platner a victim, although you can bet that’ll be his next fake narrative. 

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Ed: This is sheer desperation to rescue themselves from a trap they set and then stumbled into. This exposes the lies and hypocrisy of the feminist Left, which is only concerned about power and not about women. 

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Natalie Jackson: For National Journal this week, I broke down what the failures were that brought us Platner in the first place, now that we’re about to see the end of his candidacy. A fundamental key was the lack of curiosity among a set of consultants who think they know better about what working-class voters actually want.

Instead of progress, we got an insulting caricature — because surely what working-class voters want is a scruffy, tough-talking oyster farmer who has a few skeletons in his closet and actually grew up kind of privileged. That’ll make them say “Hey, he’s just like us!”

This type of thinking will ensure Democrats lose even more of the working class.

Ed: I've commented several times on how the Platner project shows how the Left sees masculinity from what it supposes is the Right's perspective. Jackson puts her finger on another problem, which is that the progressive elite have no idea what "working class" actually is. For one thing, Platner has barely worked at all since leaving the military a decade or so ago, and mainly mooches off his wealthy parents. The Left is anchored in Academia and wouldn't know a working-class family if they fell on one. That's how they ended up with Platner. 

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Ed: Exactly. The Left keeps trying to reverse-engineer masculinity and working-class values rather than just embrace them, and what they get is embarrassing phoniness. 

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Emily Suttle-Braun at Newsweek: A decade ago, I dated Graham Platner.

He was never once cruel to me. He was warm and funny and, in the ordinary sense of the word, respectful. We drank too much. We slept together. We were careless with ourselves in the way a lot of people in their twenties are, but not with each other. It was extremely casual and short-lived. ...

Until this week, I was a supporter. I believed he could be the kind of plainspoken, populist progressive “Mamdani for Maine” candidate that our party is starving for.

And I believe Jenny Racicot and Lyndsey Fifield.

I want to leave those two sentences sitting next to each other, because the discomfort between them is the whole point.

We say we believe women. What we usually mean is that we believe women when it is cheap. We believe them when the accused is a stranger or a Republican or a man none of us liked anyway. The real test is what you do when believing her costs you something. When the man is your friend. When he was good to you. When you have the texts on your phone to prove he was never anything but kind to you.

Ed: It's a fascinating and frustrating essay, but kudos to Ms. Suttle-Braun for writing it. I'm not sure why it took until this week for her to "believe Jenny Racicot and Lyndsey Fifield," given that both of them went public six weeks ago to describe violent and disturbing behavior. She continued to support Platner despite all of the evidence piling up about his low character and the testimony of three women in the NYT article. Racicot's claim about rape was a step too far for Suttle-Braun but she never explains why. It's still a good read, and it took some guts to go on the record with this. 

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Ed: Platner still gets to 42% in a poll taken the day after a woman accused him of rape, and six weeks after three women told the New York Times about Platner's disturbing behavior. This comes from PPP, which is a progressive polling outfit, so take the number with a small grain of salt. The most disturbing part of this is that Janet Mills still falls short of Platner's level of support against Collins. 

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Scott Jennings on CNN, via RCP: The only thing I disagree with is when she said that he hadn't been vetted. No, he had been vetted. All of the things that have been stated, it was all out in the public, and people like Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Walz, "The Bulwark," "Pod Save America," all of these people came together to overlook it all, to explain it all, to rationalize it all.

He was vetted. People knew all these things, and a whole bunch of Democrats in Maine showed up and voted for him anyway. And a bunch of donors from around the country sent him money anyway. I agree with Alyssa's question. What changed? Why are you bailing on Graham Platner now? You already signed off on Nazi tattoo, a self-described communist, somebody who's had rape fantasies, somebody who has been on a social media platform known as a playground for predators, and on, and on, and on, and on and on.

And the difference between this accuser and the previous one is simply this: she's a liberal. It's okay, I guess, for Democrats that their candidates assault conservatives. But he broke into someone's house. And apparently, according to her, raped her. And because her politics are correct, they can now believe it.

All of this whole thing is disgusting but to say that they hadn't vetted him, or that they didn't know about all this is totally false. They knew it and they signed up for it and I don't know why they're backing away from this scumbag today when they had already signed off on all that other crazy behavior.

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Ed: Yep. That's exactly right. And some, like Sunny Hostin on The View, still back Platner despite all of this, out of desperation for power. They don't care about anything else, and their progressive masks are slipping to reveal the fascists they have always been. 

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(her endorsement is her merit you don't just hand them out like candy )

Ed: I thought she had endorsed Platner, but I stand corrected. 

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Mediaite: Democrats who supported the disgraced candidate will “wear the Platner tattoo for the rest of their lives in politics, like he’s going to wear the reputation for the Nazi tattoo,” Hewitt told Roberts, adding, “There was one Democrat who did not endorse Graham Platner: AOC.”

Hewitt, a Fox News contributor, continued, “She kind of read the room. She saw the warning signs, and she stayed away. She didn’t want anything to do with this guy, and so my hat is off. Again, she’s got sparkle, and she’s got some political instincts that the older ones don’t have. But [New York City] Mayor Mamdani and [Elizabeth] Warren and Bernie [Sanders], they all fell for it. They all fell for the consultant from New York riding in from Dodge and saying, ‘This is a guy we can turn into a candidate.'”

Ed: There were a few who smelled a rat. John Fetterman did a lot more than AOC to call out "P-Hustle," and House Democrat Tom Suozzi steered clear of Platner and the entire DSA class. But yes, AOC managed to keep her hands clean on Platner. 

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Ed: It's not clear from the 2023 link that this ever got fully adjudicated. You can bet we'll find out more if Jackson replaces Platner on the ballot, though. 

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Batya Ungar-Sargon: Obviously, it’s better for the Democrats to drop an alleged rapist than stand by him. But it also only underscores just how long they were willing to defend him, just how much they were willing to forgive.

I joked that Graham Platner’s campaign was like a gameshow: How low will the Democrats go? They defended him from accusations of physical abuse. They defended him from mocking veterans. They defended him blaming women for their own sexual assaults. Worst of all, they defended his Nazi tattoo.

The Nazi tattoo really should have been a dealbreaker. There is just no coming back from defending a Nazi tattoo. And yet, for the country’s top Democrats, it just wasn’t.

Ed: I'm not sure that we've plumbed the depths yet to answer Batya's question. Some Democrats now think rape is not enough of a disqualifier. 

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WSJ: American military forces launched new strikes on Iran Wednesday night, according to the U.S. Central Command, hours after President Trump announced the end of an eight-week ceasefire.

The strikes were designed to “further degrade their ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz,” according to a Centcom statement. ...

Explosions were reported in Bandar Abbas and Sirik, the same sites that U.S. strikes hit in Tuesday night’s round of attacks, according to Iranian media. The attacks were broader in scope than Tuesday’s, hitting many of the same targets as well as missile and drone storage areas around the Arabian Gulf, according to a senior U.S. official.

The latest strikes, the second round in just 24 hours, were the starkest sign yet that efforts to clinch a permanent peace agreement are unraveling. In addition to ordering strikes on Tuesday, Trump also revoked a license allowing Iran to sell oil on the open market, eliminating the primary economic benefit for Tehran of an interim peace deal with the U.S.

Ed: Iran has yet to comply with the ceasefire or the MOU. They should not get any economic benefit from their perfidy. The questions that arise from this is whether this is the end of the ceasefire entirely, or just a punishment intended to enforce it, and whether the US can sustain either. If the ceasefire is truly over, then the range of action should be at its zenith, but that depends on resources as well as the will to employ them. 

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As I've observed in the past, that's more than enough amphib/ground combat power to take and hold Kharg Island.

We haven't been told where the IRGCN coastal defense and fast boat assets are that CENTCOM struck in the last 24 hrs. Kharg is up north in the Gulf. For a Kharg takedown, that's where we'd want to decisively flatten Iran's local resistance. The fast boats and coastal defense missiles are "must-eliminate" for an amphib landing.

Ed: From the chatter I've seen online, the targets appear to be much closer to the Strait than Kharg. This is still worth watching, however. Seizing Kharg would essentially strangle the IRGC, and no amount of propaganda would cover the humiliation. 

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Various sources: A dissident university organization inside Iran, named Sarbedaran (Those Bound for the Gallows), which identifies itself as supporting the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), also known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), announced on its telegram and Instagram channels and X account today that that it had defaced the homepages of more than 900 portals of 12 Universities in Iran. They included: 

  • Islamic Azad University (nationwide)
  • Elm va San’at (Science and Industry) University
  • Tabiyat Modarres University
  • Khajeh Nasir University
  • University of Isfahan
  • Kharrazmi University
  • Imam Sadeq University
  • Yasuj University
  • Gonbad Kavous University
  • Isfahan University of Arts
  • Isfahan Industrial University
  • Judicial Affairs University

    • They said the action was meant as a tribute to the students murdered by the dictatorship of the clerical regime, particularly during the July 9 and 10, 1999 student uprising. The first pages of the websites were replaced with Iranian Resistance Leadership images and slogans:

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  • "Death to the ruthless King Mojtaba"
  • "Curse be upon the bloodthirsty Khomeini"
  • "Curse be upon the tyrant Khamenei"
  • "Long Live Rajavi"
  • “We seek to shatter the endless cycle of kings and clerics in Iran’s history, Let's break through the heavens and build something entirely new.”

    • Ed: I have been sent several reports that university students are starting to rise up against the regime. I consider the source to be credible and reliable, so watch very carefully to see if this spreads. I would suggest watching foreign media for developments on these developments. 

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    Ed: Go figure!

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    Last night's lyric: "Driver's Seat" by Sniff & The Tears.

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