Mike, thank you for writing this. Your message is clear, direct and so badly needed. I love your comparison of how each party responds to the same information differently. Unfortunately, it's been proven true over and over again.
Supporting Platner, based on the information we had, wasn't wrong. Withdrawing that support when new information was given also wasn't wrong. Both decisions were made for good reasons. We're human and when it's all said and done, you can never go wrong doing the right thing.
Imagine if the NYT had been as diligent investigating and reporting on trump,-Epstein-Maxwell as they have been investigating Platner. Right on the NYT doorstep a child sex trafficking modeling industry was operated and Epstein just down the street was prosecuted in 2009 and NYT knew of all trump’s scams within the state of New York. trump sets up Karen McDougal in an apartment and NYT reports zip on this? Hundreds of stories on Hillary’s email in the NYT and let’s be honest, there was no there there in the end, pretty simply Hillary comes into the State Department in January 2009, with a State Department just hacked by Bradley aka Chelsea Manning, a completely unsecured disorganized State Department messaging system left by Condoleeza Rice and Bush ( who used RNC server and lost over 20 million emails FYI) with two wars going and the world in financial free fall Hillary asks Colin Powell what to do for secure communication and he says “use your personal server, that’s what I had to do.” Hillary took Colin Powell’s advice and she never got hacked, but the FBi did ( as testified by James Comey.) There you have it. The NYT could have done that succinct story and gotten to work on due diligence investigating and reporting on the scams. Crimes. Sexual assaults, sex traffickjng and sexual abuse involvement of trump. There is no excuse for the NYT publishing an op-ed in 2024 opining that trump has the character to be President and Kamala Harris does not and publishing a very lengthy option by NYT publisher on why the NYT was not going to endorse a Presidential candidate in 2024. The NYT pulled out its calculator just like the Republicans in the Senate who confirmed multiple credibly accused sexually assaulters for the cabinet and Supreme Court, the monetary benefit in profits outweighed the ethics. As everyone seems to be praising the NYT reporting on Platner in affirming and protecting American women against a sexual predator, we all must ask why the NYT did not do the same level of investigation and reporting to affirm women and protect woman and children against trump.
Their reporting on those things were actually quite good. I'm no fan of the NYT, but they have had very good deep reporting on all of these matters. The problem is that half the country thinks the NYT is a house of liberal lies. Republicans don't believe any reporting that is bad for their side.
Agreed, the reporting is good, but the sane-washing and headlines that obscure his deep flaws and corruption—nonexistent.
This was the Iraq War on steroids—defending the indefensible! And their editorial board may not resemble the WSJ or Wapo—but they were getting close during the elections.
And here is the reason—Vanguard and BlackRock are two of Trump’s biggest supporters; together they control over $26 trillion in AUM—and also happen to own 18% of the NYT’s. Other financial companies and hedge firms aligned with them make their share even larger.
Bottom line, they are part of the problem, not the solution—and the reason guys like Paul Krugman jumped ship.
Be honest, did you know much at all about Epstein and Maxwell and trump’s relationship with them prior to 2019? Did you know anything about out Karen McDougal prior to the Stormy Daniels coming out? Do you know of a NYT detailed reporting listing every contractor and subcontractor scammed by trump? If you were the opinion page editor of the NYT’s knowing all you know and the NYT’s knows about would you publish an op-ed that says trump has the character to be President? Would you headline trump’s trading profits and crypto profits the past 18 months as “windfalls” and his lies as “yarns” and “stretching the truth?” Look at all the stories the NYT has run serially on Platner in such a short period of time and asks yourself honestly if the reporting on trump-Epstein-Maxwell since 2009 ever amounted to the due diligence against Platner. Look at the NYT serial assault on President Biden health and neurological examinations and the misinformation on the White House medical team log, a team that cares for the entire White House staff. Repeatedly NYT reporters have sat on important stories the public needs to know about in real time so they can put it in a book and make the talk show circuit that inflates the NYT status. What the Platner story tells us is this: the NYT is capable of good honest and responsible reporting to inform Americans preparing to vote on a candidate and they have done that for Maine, yet the NYT publisher wrote a lengthy op-ed white washing any ethical responsibility to be honest about trump. The NYT savaged President Biden and called for him to step down because of cognitive issues but never called for trump to do the same because of corruption issues and numerous ethical issues from “credible” “ corroborated” numerous sexual assaults and pedophile conduct reports. In sum we know what the NYT is capable of in terms of good reporting but we also know what the NYT is capable of in terms of unethical and negligent reporting.
A lot of people forget that Trump said a lot of the correct (progressive, policy-wise) things during his first run for the Presidency. Same pattern with Fetterman. Nazis and their hangers on will say *anything* to get into power...or be an influencer, for that matter.
Not a big revelation. Also one that folks seem to need to relearn, over and over.
I too believed him. His body language showed no defensiveness when he was being questioned about serious accusations. That is a sign not only of honesty but of someone who has his ego under control—a very rare quality.
I think the true fault lies with the fact that we are a culture that is ridiculously unable to talk about sex and how it affects both men and women. I preferred male company growing up even tho I’m female. I got used to both the positive and negative sides of them. I expect them to be sexually driven in a way most women don’t share or understand. And we never will if we can’t get more matter of fact about human nature. Men and women aren’t acculturated in the same way and don’t respond in the same way to perceived signals. Therefore I think that it is always going to be very messy when trying to figure out what was real in sexual disputes.
I think Mike is brilliant, but I have strong reservations about this particular judgement.
I think that Schumer and the Democratic Party engineered the revelation of this story at this particular time. VERY SHORTLY before the time for Platner to be able to remove himself from the ballot. ENOUGH time for the Democratic machine to pick a more moderate candidate to replace Platner.
I have a Democratic friend who is freaked out about the Democratic Socialists who have been doing well because she believes they will lose in general elections. Platner is not a Democratic Socialist but he is leftist and full of passion. This is equivalent to her. Schumer backed Janet Mills in the primary race even tho she was much less popular. I think that the Democratic Machine has a stranglehold on its party and always picks a Moderate because they believe that only a moderate can win and may even pull in some Republican votes. And then they lose.
I think Platner’s campaign is toast but I think he should use his leverage in deciding whether to step down by insisting that someone who shares his ideas and his passion be the nominee to replace him.
If this woman is lying, and the corroborating text messages and accounts are manufactured, then Platner will win a remarkably large settlement in a defamation suit in the future. But I intend to stand on this judgement.
When it comes to sex, men and women really don’t understand each other, and maybe not even ourselves. No wonder. We are so screwed up because of our frantic pearl clutching about that subject. I think it’s very hard to untangle the truth in sexual disputes because each gender is sending and receiving signals that aren’t understood.
Where are the police? Where are the prosecutors? The court of public opinion is too eager to validate false accusations without due process. The nonstop volume of accusations against Platner have been less than credible. I’ll be convinced this isn’t another, probably foreign-funded, false accusation hit job when he’s actually indicted in a real court.
I watched Mika Brezenzki skeptically grill the politico writer this morning. He repeatedly insisted the allegations are credible because of hearsay corroborations from the accuser’s friends and therapists. He also seemed to have done very little to find any exculpatory evidence at all. Real evidence is required for verifiable credibility, not hearsay. Due process is the tried and true way to ascertain credibility. Don’t shitcan the rule of law here.
Politics rather than law makes it way more possible that this is a false accusation. Remember the week the Atlantic posted about 10 different anti-Platner articles? That barrage smelled so untrustworthy that it sure made it seem like a well coordinated hit job. And, sad day for them, Platner won the primary anyway. I doubted the folks who’d done that coordinating would give up after he won the primary. Sure enough, unlike all the earlier accusations, along comes a new and improved allegation at a grander scale, far more sourced, and that seemingly all media voices agree, using often identical, probably focus-group tested, phrases, that it just has to be true.
Not buying it. Media treatment of Platner is still untrustworthy. Still smells like a well funded well coordinated smear. And yeah, that’s politics.
I also watched Mika this morning and the entire time I was thinking if Platner were a Repub would she be grilling the reporter with the same amount of skepticism? Of course not. And full disclosure, I'm not now and have never been a R.
Maybe I'm overly lawyering, but you wrote: "This is what a credible accusation looks like. Contemporaneous disclosure. Documentary corroboration. Multiple witnesses." What witnesses? As I understand the allegation this was a one on one interraction. There are no witnesses. There is corroborating evidence (the contemporaneous complaints and therapy records), but that does not rise to the level of "witnesses."
That's a distortion of my comment. I did not make any reference to whether the allegation is credible. My only issue is your statement that there are "multiple witnesses." There are no witnesses. If you want to be accurate with your journalism you should edit that statement. Or elucidate who you are referring to as a "witness." Being a recipient of a timely communication from the victim does not make one a "witness" to the event.
Yes there are. Her friend who she spoke to in 2019 after it happened, and the people she texted with are contemporaneous witnesses. They speak to the credibility of the claim. And a court prosecuting these case would put them on the stand as witnesses.
Yes, evidence of a "fresh complaint" is admissible for corroboration as to the truth of the underlying claim. But that does not make those persons "witnesses" to the assault. They are "corroborating witnesses." Very different. You should have written "multiple corroborating witnesses." To write simply that there are "witnesses" is misleading. I have no allegiance to Platner; unlike you, I did not support him (not a ME resident) nor did I contribute to his campaign for other reasons (his anti-Israel/anti-Jew positions, for instance), but despite my antipathy towards him I still believe your reporting should be accurate and not misleading.
Not really. If you tell the average non-lawyer person that there are "multiple witnesses," I bet most will at first think there are people who witnessed the assault. Why can't you just say there are "multiple corroborating witnesses," or multiple people who received semi-contemporaneous reports of the assault? Don't you want to be as accurate as possible?
Having worked in civil complaint adjudication for some time, I would not assume "witness" to mean "witness to the assault" (or whatever incident. Witnesses are used to establish all manner of evidence in credibility assessments (corroboration, patterns of behavior, motivation, hearsay, etc.), not just direct observation of the incident.
A "corroborating witness" is a witness. I think most people who have watched court dramas well understand that most witnesses in a court case are not direct observers of the criminal act. Especially in these cases. Because there are usually, by definition, only two.
He may as well have been a plant, but actually this is just how things are in this country. I have come to believe America is structurally doomed to fail. Democrats will self sabotage at any given opportunity and the right are completely delusional, there are no winners here. Dems will lose the Senate, nobody will be able to do anything about the criminals currently running Washington and the nation will slide even farther and deeper into poverty, chaos, and division. All the people gloating or gnashing their teeth about this today just fail to see the bigger, deeply horrifying picture. This will just be another footnote in future textbooks about the destruction of the United States and the failures that lead up to it.
I think you've identified something larger than this one race. A political party's integrity isn't measured by how it treats easy cases. It's measured by what it does when doing the right thing carries a political cost.
If credible evidence continues to accumulate, then protecting the public's trust has to come before protecting a Senate seat. Otherwise, we become exactly what we criticize in others.
I've spent more than two decades working on election transparency, and one lesson keeps repeating itself: public confidence depends on consistent standards. Whether we're talking about elections, ethics, or public service, the standard can't change depending on whose team benefits.
We don't strengthen democracy by defending "our side." We strengthen it by following the evidence wherever it leads—even when it's uncomfortable.
That John Fetterman finally got something right doesn’t change the fact that he is a lying imposter who should no more count as a meaningful call for Platner to step down than if it had come from lying Josh Hawley.
Yes, Platner must withdraw. But Ms. Racicot deserves criticism for not coming forth as soon as he started running. I know speaking out is emotionally difficult yada yada yada, and I, as a privileged man can never understand how hard it is yada yada yada. But her squeamishness may have cost us control of the Senate for the next two years, and enabled Trump to continue his destruction of democracy. It was morally irresponsible to dither until the last minute the way she did. Sometimes doing the right thing is hard. You have to do it anyway. Being marginalized is not a free ticket to civic irresponsibility. She had a moment to change history thrust upon her, and she dropped it.
I don't think she had a "moral responsibility" to come forward. She didn't ask for this. The fact that women in this position have to choose between the pain of public humiliation and seeking justice elides any right for anyone else to sit in judgement about how they choose to navigate that.
The fact that you didn't ask for an obligation does not mean that it doesn't exist. The young people who fought Hitler weren't to blame for anything he did. They still had a moral obligation to risk their lives to stop him, because they were the only ones who could do it.
"It's just not" is just a fancy way of saying I don't have a reason. It's one of the many woke tropes that deserves to die. Sometimes people have unfair moral responsibilities thrust upon them, and they must rise to the occasion. Reporting an assault a couple of months earlier is a lot easier than risking your life to stop Hitler.
Mike I really appreciate your ethics and argument here. I’m sorry for what speaking up costs you. I know you won’t agree that it costs you because it’s the right thing to do. But there are a lot of assholes to deal with. I’m glad you can deal with them and not be discouraged - or at least I hope you can stay strong in the face of discouragement.
Hey Mike, I just sent you a recommendation in your chat, but I wanted to tell you here too. Check out preparedness & politics, it’s an excellent Substack with a lot of well sourced information about the actual nuts and bolts of what we’re headed into. Check him out I think y’all could really inform each other, and therefore us, even better
I’m nobody important so I didn’t “endorse” Platner, but I did support him. As someone with a disqualifying past, the idea that someone who had walked some of the nightmare miles that I had was very exciting. I started to question it after the sexting allegations, because they were so recent. If you’re in recovery and working on your core issues, you generally need more than 2-3 years to make any progress. Graham’s inability to accept any accountability tells me he still has a lot of work to do. We need to have candidates with real life experiences and challenges, but their recover arc has to be longer than their campaign for public office. It’s accountability that is always the key
I wish I could see a way out for your once great notion of a country.
However, I have watched you self-degrade since Reagan onwards via Republican treason and the capture of your media since well before the vile Limbaugh, all corrupted by the rabid business pursuit of the holy dollar.
And when finally the GOP came to the point of discarding all traditional political decencies, your precious Democracy like a toothpick "hurtless broke".
Mike, thank you for writing this. Your message is clear, direct and so badly needed. I love your comparison of how each party responds to the same information differently. Unfortunately, it's been proven true over and over again.
Supporting Platner, based on the information we had, wasn't wrong. Withdrawing that support when new information was given also wasn't wrong. Both decisions were made for good reasons. We're human and when it's all said and done, you can never go wrong doing the right thing.
Imagine if the NYT had been as diligent investigating and reporting on trump,-Epstein-Maxwell as they have been investigating Platner. Right on the NYT doorstep a child sex trafficking modeling industry was operated and Epstein just down the street was prosecuted in 2009 and NYT knew of all trump’s scams within the state of New York. trump sets up Karen McDougal in an apartment and NYT reports zip on this? Hundreds of stories on Hillary’s email in the NYT and let’s be honest, there was no there there in the end, pretty simply Hillary comes into the State Department in January 2009, with a State Department just hacked by Bradley aka Chelsea Manning, a completely unsecured disorganized State Department messaging system left by Condoleeza Rice and Bush ( who used RNC server and lost over 20 million emails FYI) with two wars going and the world in financial free fall Hillary asks Colin Powell what to do for secure communication and he says “use your personal server, that’s what I had to do.” Hillary took Colin Powell’s advice and she never got hacked, but the FBi did ( as testified by James Comey.) There you have it. The NYT could have done that succinct story and gotten to work on due diligence investigating and reporting on the scams. Crimes. Sexual assaults, sex traffickjng and sexual abuse involvement of trump. There is no excuse for the NYT publishing an op-ed in 2024 opining that trump has the character to be President and Kamala Harris does not and publishing a very lengthy option by NYT publisher on why the NYT was not going to endorse a Presidential candidate in 2024. The NYT pulled out its calculator just like the Republicans in the Senate who confirmed multiple credibly accused sexually assaulters for the cabinet and Supreme Court, the monetary benefit in profits outweighed the ethics. As everyone seems to be praising the NYT reporting on Platner in affirming and protecting American women against a sexual predator, we all must ask why the NYT did not do the same level of investigation and reporting to affirm women and protect woman and children against trump.
Their reporting on those things were actually quite good. I'm no fan of the NYT, but they have had very good deep reporting on all of these matters. The problem is that half the country thinks the NYT is a house of liberal lies. Republicans don't believe any reporting that is bad for their side.
Agreed, the reporting is good, but the sane-washing and headlines that obscure his deep flaws and corruption—nonexistent.
This was the Iraq War on steroids—defending the indefensible! And their editorial board may not resemble the WSJ or Wapo—but they were getting close during the elections.
And here is the reason—Vanguard and BlackRock are two of Trump’s biggest supporters; together they control over $26 trillion in AUM—and also happen to own 18% of the NYT’s. Other financial companies and hedge firms aligned with them make their share even larger.
Bottom line, they are part of the problem, not the solution—and the reason guys like Paul Krugman jumped ship.
Be honest, did you know much at all about Epstein and Maxwell and trump’s relationship with them prior to 2019? Did you know anything about out Karen McDougal prior to the Stormy Daniels coming out? Do you know of a NYT detailed reporting listing every contractor and subcontractor scammed by trump? If you were the opinion page editor of the NYT’s knowing all you know and the NYT’s knows about would you publish an op-ed that says trump has the character to be President? Would you headline trump’s trading profits and crypto profits the past 18 months as “windfalls” and his lies as “yarns” and “stretching the truth?” Look at all the stories the NYT has run serially on Platner in such a short period of time and asks yourself honestly if the reporting on trump-Epstein-Maxwell since 2009 ever amounted to the due diligence against Platner. Look at the NYT serial assault on President Biden health and neurological examinations and the misinformation on the White House medical team log, a team that cares for the entire White House staff. Repeatedly NYT reporters have sat on important stories the public needs to know about in real time so they can put it in a book and make the talk show circuit that inflates the NYT status. What the Platner story tells us is this: the NYT is capable of good honest and responsible reporting to inform Americans preparing to vote on a candidate and they have done that for Maine, yet the NYT publisher wrote a lengthy op-ed white washing any ethical responsibility to be honest about trump. The NYT savaged President Biden and called for him to step down because of cognitive issues but never called for trump to do the same because of corruption issues and numerous ethical issues from “credible” “ corroborated” numerous sexual assaults and pedophile conduct reports. In sum we know what the NYT is capable of in terms of good reporting but we also know what the NYT is capable of in terms of unethical and negligent reporting.
An accurate message. Too often the NYT leaves stones unturned to gain access and support the views of the donor class.
Well said…:)
A lot of people forget that Trump said a lot of the correct (progressive, policy-wise) things during his first run for the Presidency. Same pattern with Fetterman. Nazis and their hangers on will say *anything* to get into power...or be an influencer, for that matter.
Not a big revelation. Also one that folks seem to need to relearn, over and over.
I too believed him. His body language showed no defensiveness when he was being questioned about serious accusations. That is a sign not only of honesty but of someone who has his ego under control—a very rare quality.
I think the true fault lies with the fact that we are a culture that is ridiculously unable to talk about sex and how it affects both men and women. I preferred male company growing up even tho I’m female. I got used to both the positive and negative sides of them. I expect them to be sexually driven in a way most women don’t share or understand. And we never will if we can’t get more matter of fact about human nature. Men and women aren’t acculturated in the same way and don’t respond in the same way to perceived signals. Therefore I think that it is always going to be very messy when trying to figure out what was real in sexual disputes.
I think Mike is brilliant, but I have strong reservations about this particular judgement.
I think that Schumer and the Democratic Party engineered the revelation of this story at this particular time. VERY SHORTLY before the time for Platner to be able to remove himself from the ballot. ENOUGH time for the Democratic machine to pick a more moderate candidate to replace Platner.
I have a Democratic friend who is freaked out about the Democratic Socialists who have been doing well because she believes they will lose in general elections. Platner is not a Democratic Socialist but he is leftist and full of passion. This is equivalent to her. Schumer backed Janet Mills in the primary race even tho she was much less popular. I think that the Democratic Machine has a stranglehold on its party and always picks a Moderate because they believe that only a moderate can win and may even pull in some Republican votes. And then they lose.
I think Platner’s campaign is toast but I think he should use his leverage in deciding whether to step down by insisting that someone who shares his ideas and his passion be the nominee to replace him.
If this woman is lying, and the corroborating text messages and accounts are manufactured, then Platner will win a remarkably large settlement in a defamation suit in the future. But I intend to stand on this judgement.
When it comes to sex, men and women really don’t understand each other, and maybe not even ourselves. No wonder. We are so screwed up because of our frantic pearl clutching about that subject. I think it’s very hard to untangle the truth in sexual disputes because each gender is sending and receiving signals that aren’t understood.
I completely agree. Our country’s schizoid attitude towards sex causes infinite problems, not just in politics
Where are the police? Where are the prosecutors? The court of public opinion is too eager to validate false accusations without due process. The nonstop volume of accusations against Platner have been less than credible. I’ll be convinced this isn’t another, probably foreign-funded, false accusation hit job when he’s actually indicted in a real court.
I watched Mika Brezenzki skeptically grill the politico writer this morning. He repeatedly insisted the allegations are credible because of hearsay corroborations from the accuser’s friends and therapists. He also seemed to have done very little to find any exculpatory evidence at all. Real evidence is required for verifiable credibility, not hearsay. Due process is the tried and true way to ascertain credibility. Don’t shitcan the rule of law here.
Due process is not relevant here. This is politics.
Politics rather than law makes it way more possible that this is a false accusation. Remember the week the Atlantic posted about 10 different anti-Platner articles? That barrage smelled so untrustworthy that it sure made it seem like a well coordinated hit job. And, sad day for them, Platner won the primary anyway. I doubted the folks who’d done that coordinating would give up after he won the primary. Sure enough, unlike all the earlier accusations, along comes a new and improved allegation at a grander scale, far more sourced, and that seemingly all media voices agree, using often identical, probably focus-group tested, phrases, that it just has to be true.
Not buying it. Media treatment of Platner is still untrustworthy. Still smells like a well funded well coordinated smear. And yeah, that’s politics.
I also watched Mika this morning and the entire time I was thinking if Platner were a Repub would she be grilling the reporter with the same amount of skepticism? Of course not. And full disclosure, I'm not now and have never been a R.
Maybe I'm overly lawyering, but you wrote: "This is what a credible accusation looks like. Contemporaneous disclosure. Documentary corroboration. Multiple witnesses." What witnesses? As I understand the allegation this was a one on one interraction. There are no witnesses. There is corroborating evidence (the contemporaneous complaints and therapy records), but that does not rise to the level of "witnesses."
Yes. It’s a credible accusation.
That's a distortion of my comment. I did not make any reference to whether the allegation is credible. My only issue is your statement that there are "multiple witnesses." There are no witnesses. If you want to be accurate with your journalism you should edit that statement. Or elucidate who you are referring to as a "witness." Being a recipient of a timely communication from the victim does not make one a "witness" to the event.
Yes there are. Her friend who she spoke to in 2019 after it happened, and the people she texted with are contemporaneous witnesses. They speak to the credibility of the claim. And a court prosecuting these case would put them on the stand as witnesses.
Yes, evidence of a "fresh complaint" is admissible for corroboration as to the truth of the underlying claim. But that does not make those persons "witnesses" to the assault. They are "corroborating witnesses." Very different. You should have written "multiple corroborating witnesses." To write simply that there are "witnesses" is misleading. I have no allegiance to Platner; unlike you, I did not support him (not a ME resident) nor did I contribute to his campaign for other reasons (his anti-Israel/anti-Jew positions, for instance), but despite my antipathy towards him I still believe your reporting should be accurate and not misleading.
This is very hair-splitting.
Not really. If you tell the average non-lawyer person that there are "multiple witnesses," I bet most will at first think there are people who witnessed the assault. Why can't you just say there are "multiple corroborating witnesses," or multiple people who received semi-contemporaneous reports of the assault? Don't you want to be as accurate as possible?
Having worked in civil complaint adjudication for some time, I would not assume "witness" to mean "witness to the assault" (or whatever incident. Witnesses are used to establish all manner of evidence in credibility assessments (corroboration, patterns of behavior, motivation, hearsay, etc.), not just direct observation of the incident.
A "corroborating witness" is a witness. I think most people who have watched court dramas well understand that most witnesses in a court case are not direct observers of the criminal act. Especially in these cases. Because there are usually, by definition, only two.
He may as well have been a plant, but actually this is just how things are in this country. I have come to believe America is structurally doomed to fail. Democrats will self sabotage at any given opportunity and the right are completely delusional, there are no winners here. Dems will lose the Senate, nobody will be able to do anything about the criminals currently running Washington and the nation will slide even farther and deeper into poverty, chaos, and division. All the people gloating or gnashing their teeth about this today just fail to see the bigger, deeply horrifying picture. This will just be another footnote in future textbooks about the destruction of the United States and the failures that lead up to it.
Mike,
Thank you for writing this.
I think you've identified something larger than this one race. A political party's integrity isn't measured by how it treats easy cases. It's measured by what it does when doing the right thing carries a political cost.
If credible evidence continues to accumulate, then protecting the public's trust has to come before protecting a Senate seat. Otherwise, we become exactly what we criticize in others.
I've spent more than two decades working on election transparency, and one lesson keeps repeating itself: public confidence depends on consistent standards. Whether we're talking about elections, ethics, or public service, the standard can't change depending on whose team benefits.
We don't strengthen democracy by defending "our side." We strengthen it by following the evidence wherever it leads—even when it's uncomfortable.
Thank you for reminding us of that.
That John Fetterman finally got something right doesn’t change the fact that he is a lying imposter who should no more count as a meaningful call for Platner to step down than if it had come from lying Josh Hawley.
Yes, Platner must withdraw. But Ms. Racicot deserves criticism for not coming forth as soon as he started running. I know speaking out is emotionally difficult yada yada yada, and I, as a privileged man can never understand how hard it is yada yada yada. But her squeamishness may have cost us control of the Senate for the next two years, and enabled Trump to continue his destruction of democracy. It was morally irresponsible to dither until the last minute the way she did. Sometimes doing the right thing is hard. You have to do it anyway. Being marginalized is not a free ticket to civic irresponsibility. She had a moment to change history thrust upon her, and she dropped it.
This is victim-blaming.
Yes, it is. My point is that being a victim does not absolve you of all moral responsibility.
I don't think she had a "moral responsibility" to come forward. She didn't ask for this. The fact that women in this position have to choose between the pain of public humiliation and seeking justice elides any right for anyone else to sit in judgement about how they choose to navigate that.
The fact that you didn't ask for an obligation does not mean that it doesn't exist. The young people who fought Hitler weren't to blame for anything he did. They still had a moral obligation to risk their lives to stop him, because they were the only ones who could do it.
While this may be true in the abstract, it’s not ok to blame a victim of sexual assault for her timing. It’s just not.
"It's just not" is just a fancy way of saying I don't have a reason. It's one of the many woke tropes that deserves to die. Sometimes people have unfair moral responsibilities thrust upon them, and they must rise to the occasion. Reporting an assault a couple of months earlier is a lot easier than risking your life to stop Hitler.
The right hates women and has no interest in punishing men so it's easy for them to play this game. Thank you for calling this out for what it is.
Mike I really appreciate your ethics and argument here. I’m sorry for what speaking up costs you. I know you won’t agree that it costs you because it’s the right thing to do. But there are a lot of assholes to deal with. I’m glad you can deal with them and not be discouraged - or at least I hope you can stay strong in the face of discouragement.
Hey Mike, I just sent you a recommendation in your chat, but I wanted to tell you here too. Check out preparedness & politics, it’s an excellent Substack with a lot of well sourced information about the actual nuts and bolts of what we’re headed into. Check him out I think y’all could really inform each other, and therefore us, even better
I’m nobody important so I didn’t “endorse” Platner, but I did support him. As someone with a disqualifying past, the idea that someone who had walked some of the nightmare miles that I had was very exciting. I started to question it after the sexting allegations, because they were so recent. If you’re in recovery and working on your core issues, you generally need more than 2-3 years to make any progress. Graham’s inability to accept any accountability tells me he still has a lot of work to do. We need to have candidates with real life experiences and challenges, but their recover arc has to be longer than their campaign for public office. It’s accountability that is always the key
I wish I could see a way out for your once great notion of a country.
However, I have watched you self-degrade since Reagan onwards via Republican treason and the capture of your media since well before the vile Limbaugh, all corrupted by the rabid business pursuit of the holy dollar.
And when finally the GOP came to the point of discarding all traditional political decencies, your precious Democracy like a toothpick "hurtless broke".
We are already on our way out. Dems are going to sweep Congress in the Fall. And they’ll win by margins too large for cheating.