Graham Platner’s critics are operating with a politically motivated double standard.
  • bampop@lemmy.world
    71·
    6 hours ago

    You only need to look through the comments section here to find a bunch of fake outrage propped up by bad faith arguments. It’s hard to know the right wing bots from the useful idiots, but based on the ready supply of disingenuous shallow talking points I’d say most are in the former camp.

  • godsammitdam@lemmy.zip
    17·
    17 hours ago

    Articles backfired, voters don’t believe it.

    Also, where are the articles on Collins’ insider trading? Her voting record on the war and her defense contractor lobbyist husband? Her alleged infidelity with a man that she then married while he divorced his former wife while she was dying of cancer?

    Nah, instead “Platner has bad vibes ya know, though unsubstantied” is totally more worth it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ7PS26zGKY

    Also, Scott Pelley on the inside of CBS and zionist, conservative control

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dpK9lJ3ucw

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
    5320·
    23 hours ago

    That headline is one of the stupidest things i have ever read. The dude is a politician, its perfectly fine to attack him with a political motive. Any attack on him would be politically motivated… If someone does things that are morally reprehensible, then they should be attacked for it.

    • favoredponcho@lemmy.zipOP
      643·
      23 hours ago

      You’re missing the point entirely, probably because you don’t have the context. The NY Times worked with a Heritage Foundation political operative that founded the Ladies for Kavanaugh political group to accuse him of “abuse,” which they were not able to substantiate. It’s politically motivated because the NY Times, although liberal, is a Zionist paper that would rather have a pro-Israel Republican in the Senate than a Democrat who calls the events in Gaza a genocide.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
        205·
        22 hours ago

        I mean it explains why this headline is attempting to defend him, but the headline is still stupid. It should just read “The Attacks on Graham Platner Are Unsubstantiated”

        • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
          11·
          20 hours ago

          But that is burying the lead again. Are the attacks unsubstantiated because legitimate victims simply cannot prove definitively that they were assaulted or put in a position of discomfort, or are the attacks unsubstantiated because they were made by a clearly partisan political actor? If you really don’t want to use the words “politically motivated”, you’d have to add to your headline that they were made by a pro-Israel, Ladies-for-Kavanaugh founder in order to accurately portray these attacks.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      28·
      22 hours ago

      If someone does things that are morally reprehensible

      Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it?

      Graham Platner cheating on his wife is the worst thing in history. Susan Collins green-lighting multiple genocides overseas, while callously turning her back on constituents snatched up by ICE goons, is above reproach.

      Meanwhile, Ken Paxton cheating on his wife is a private matter and fake news and only a woke transgender illegal communist would mention it. James Talarico met his wife at Good Luck Charles (Austin gay bar) and eats a turkey leg like a vegan and spent half his life as a minister where he claimed God didn’t have a gender. All of that is also supposed to be super bad.

      “Morally reprehensible” is just “whatever the Democrat did” updated daily.

      And yeah, the headline is baby-brained. But that’s American politics in a nutshell these days.

      Graham Platner’s critics are operating with a politically motivated double standard.

      Should have been the headline as it gets to the nut of our Zionist media priorities.

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
      101·
      19 hours ago

      The point the headline is trying to make are that they are baseless, they are making a mountain out of a molehill, it’s a smear campaign.

      The zionists, the oligarchs, the pedophiles, are all scared he will be elected and be a loud voice against them for like 6 years.

      • 3abas@lemmy.world
        34·
        17 hours ago

        The Zionists and oligarchs are not afraid of a was criminal who went on 5 terror tours and loved his time killing brown people so much he got a Nazi tattoo to commemorate it, by his own gleeful unapologetic admission. His portrayal as progressive should insult you, not make you jump to defend him and accuse those accuse him of sexual assault of being liars so conveniently.

        • Ænima@lemmy.zip
          21·
          7 hours ago

          It says that we’re willing to accept a flawed candidate that can admit mistakes, rather than some purist. If you’re not willing to forgive and accept flawed candidates, the downward spiral toward fascism will continue.

          The other side doesn’t give two shits about running rapists and murderers, but we can’t run a candidate that admits a dark past and tries to make amends? These purity tests have got to end!

          • 3abas@lemmy.world
            12·
            5 hours ago

            He’s unapologetic about his crimes and still talks about them proudly… At what point does it go from “flawed” to “rotten” to you? It might be impossible to change your perspective if you brush aside every accusation as a minor flaw.

            we can’t run a candidate that admits a dark past and tries to make amends

            He doesn’t. He never said he regrets his war crimes, he talks about them reminiscingly, he only calls the wars “pointless”, he has no moral objection to the crimes, he just doesn’t think Americans benefitted enough from them.

            He doesn’t identify the war machine as bad, on the contrary he wants to thank and honor and support veterans. Y’all need to stop pretending that’s a progressive idea.

            You only think in “their side” and “my side” to the point where your side winning is the goal itself, regardless of whether your side effectively does anything to advance what you think of as principals.

            Take his stance on Gaza, where he seems eager to cash in on people’s outrage by positioning himself as opposition to genocide, but you won’t see him ever address the real problem. He’s there to change the conversation and allow the status quo to continue. On Ukraine he’s happy to say that Ukrainian fighting the Russian invasion is “resisting with all the means that they can, and I personally think that we should provide them with support.” He’s unwilling to make a statement about Palestinians resisting genocide as needing support, he’s only ever willing to denounce past acts in a vacuum. Like a typical liberal zionist.

            He’s being branded as progressive by literally the same people that brought you Fetterman, it’s all aesthetics and zero substance, and you still have your arms wide open.

  • InfernoWarrior@piefed.socialEnglish
    512·
    12 hours ago

    Yeah… the guy has a Nazi tattoo. I will not support someone like that. I do not care if he says he ‘has changed’. Politicians lie all of the time. What is up with the party recently? First Graham Platner and then Maureen Galindo? Both OPENLY either has Nazi symbolatry or says to throw people in camps en masse to castrate them. EVEN PEOPLE LIKE AOC, Hakeem Jeffries, Suzan DelBene, Josh Gottheimer, Jared Moskowitz, and John Fetterman ALL CONDEMNED her and Brad Schneider, Jake Auchincloss, Cory Booker, and Janet Mills condemned him! Stop. Embracing. Nazi. Candidates. You KNOW it is bad when some of the most prominent Democratic Party leaders are condemning them and saying their rhetorics are unacceptable. If you get mad at the right for remarks that are less blatant than this over stuff like this where it is somewhat expected, you should be OUTRAGED that people this blatant are getting support in the party that is supposed to be better than this. It should not be a partisan issue to say DO NOT SYMPATHISE WITH NAZIS. What happened to ‘once a Nazi, always a Nazi’?

    Edited for grammar.

    • arrow74@lemmy.zip
      102·
      13 hours ago

      He never said “he changed” in relation to the tattoo. He said he was unaware, and honestly it’s believable. Is it really that hard to imagine some drunk military dudes in the early 2000s go to a tattoo shop in Croatia and pick a skull tattoo because they think it looks badass. If anyone in that scenario was a Nazi it was the tattoo artist for having that design ready to go.

      I swear people forget there was a time when we didn’t have the world’s information at our fingertips to lookup and know all these symbols.

      • InfernoWarrior@piefed.socialEnglish
        17·
        11 hours ago

        And what is to stop actual Nazis from claiming they ‘were unaware’? I am very willing to vote Democrat, but it just seems dodgy to me. People like Angus King, Joe Manchin, John Fetterman, Mark Kelly, Gary Peters, Barack Obama in his first term, and the likes (this is ignoring candidates of other parties I would vote for if they ran, which is many)… but this just rubs me the wrong way. That being said, I do not have the option to vote for him anyways, so it does not matter for me. Last time… I literally voted 40/10/40/10 on my local and federal ballot combined (Democrat, Green, GOP, and Libertarian). It is because I look into what the specific candidate that is running for office has done, has said, their plans, and if they have proven they have changed. When choosing your leaders, looking out for deception matters quite a lot. Reasonably, why should I vote for someone who has ANY Nazi tattoo on him, REGARDLESS of his excuses? It is why I went from liking Elon Musk pre-2025 to not fully trusting him post-2025 outside of technology when he did the Nazi salute ranting about how his ‘heart goes out to you’ and ‘civilisation’, even though I think his inventions are great. I cannot reasonably support people who do stuff like that. So again, I ask you, what is proving he is being honest when he claims he ‘was unaware’ it was a Nazi tattoo? Why should I bet on his honesty about not being a neo-Nazi when I could potentially support a different Democrat candidate with less baggage?

  • BiteSizedZeitGeist@lemmy.world
    714·
    21 hours ago

    I really don’t give a shit about Platner. I don’t care how progressive or socialist he is. I don’t care enough about him to fight over him.

    Platner hasn’t done anything to show he cares about my politics except talk a lot and run for office. I can’t think of a reason for anyone to give a shit, except that he opposes Collins.

  • BigTuffAl@lemmy.zip
    716·
    22 hours ago

    I’m more worried about the fact he’s a murderous mercenary than whether his exes have dirt on him. They don’t have a democracy over there, though, so it’s this murderer or Susan Collins (a serial murder enabler). A political system that yields these choices needs to be discarded.

    • Wataba@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      14 hours ago

      Good luck with that.

      Because generally, the best approach to a problem is to make it LESS difficult to solve.

  • UnspecificGravity@piefed.socialEnglish
    1436·
    23 hours ago

    I mean. My general opposition to anyone that self identifies as a Nazi could be defined as “politically motivated” because you know, he’s a politician.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          27·
          22 hours ago

          US Military indoctrinates a young man into a fascist cult.

          Man matures, exits the military, shows genuine remorse, joins anti-war groups and becomes an activist in opposition to the US military’s fascist agenda, and then campaigns for high office on these anti-imperialist principles.

          The sitting Senator and sitting Governor call him a fascist, while continuing to defend the very military that enlisted and promoted him while he had the tattoo.

          Really makes you think.

          • godsammitdam@lemmy.zip
            14·
            19 hours ago

            Most of these people who are still stuck on the tattoo can’t believe that you aren’t born with the knowledge innately of what Nazi iconography is.

            I, as someone from a rural red distruct, can honestly say we did not spend much time on WW2 in school. Nazis were bad, atom bomb was bad, einstein was super smart. That was about it.

            We didn’t go over what brain drain is or why it would happen (it’s happening now)

            We didn’t go over that during the era of WW2 that segregation was written into and being written into law (Jim Crow), and that the Nazis themselves learned from how we Americans wrote our cruelty into law, sometimes even being abhored at our level of cruelty.

            And I haven’t watched many movies. Everyone points to the “are we the baddies” meme, and to someone who is not aware, it could just be a symbol that was used in place of a swastika. I, personally, didn’t know it was a totenkopf, or that word, until this controversy. To someone who doesn’t have that knowledge, it’s the equivalent of a decepticon symbol. Are the people that put that on their cars actually secret cybertronians?

            People who are still hanging onto this don’t believe people can change nor do they understand that what might be considered common knowledge online is certainly not known by every person. And most of these people seem to be authoritarian supporters, left, center, and right.

            • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              8·
              19 hours ago

              Most of these people promoting the “secret Nazi” idea also didn’t know what a SS totenkopf was before the story broke. It’s an obscure symbol that looks like a lot of common symbols, not a swastika.

              On the topic of bad history schooling, I don’t think my high school required history classes even made it to WW2. I feel like we covered the period from the pilgrims to the Civil War year after year though.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
              41·
              19 hours ago

              I mean, the joke of the Platner race is how much of the national media conversation probably never makes it to the average Maine voting household.

        • Hegar@fedia.io
          232·
          22 hours ago

          The woman who started Ladies for Kavanaugh specifically to descredit Christine Blasey Ford’s rape allegations is going out of her way to say that he knew what the tattoo meant - so he almost certainly did not.

          • UnspecificGravity@piefed.socialEnglish
            1224·
            23 hours ago

            I see. And when he still had it 20 years after being a checks notes mercenary for blackwater?

            Can we maybe do better than a stupid “maybe, maybe not” Nazi next time?

            • favoredponcho@lemmy.zipOP
              221·
              22 hours ago

              Graham Platner himself says he was a piece of shit during this period of his life and struggled with PTSD. He’s owned all of it. If you read his Reddit comments too, he does discuss the tattoo in depth and makes it pretty clear that many in the military get these types of tattoos without regard for the historical context, kind of like how people get “punisher” tattoos that work in law enforcement. A lot of these people are black or brown even, but they do it because it’s just a cultural thing in the military. Not saying it’s a good thing that should continue, but just that it doesn’t strictly identify people as Nazis. Actually, a lot of Platner’s comments on Reddit make it clear that he is pretty left, even identifying as a communist and democratic socialist. So, I think the kind of attacks you’re making are very shallow and we just have to look a little deeper to find the real story. Also, we should ask ourselves if we believe in redemption, especially for someone who struggled with PTSD. Also, recognize that letting Collins win is far worse and this race is about far more than whether this guy made some mistakes in the past. Do we want to see more MAGA republicans on the Supreme Court? Do we want a senator that rubber stamps Trump’s agenda? Do we want a senator that will continue to cut taxes for the rich, or one determined to raise them on billionaires?

              • UnspecificGravity@piefed.socialEnglish
                56·
                22 hours ago

                its a shame that every argument in favor of Platner needs to be “well, he is better than the Republicans.”

                Some day we are going to get a candidate than is objectively good instead of just being better than the worst possible option.

            • Granbo's Holy Hotrod@lemmy.world
              35·
              22 hours ago

              We are all flawed but maybe we can find someone less flawed, historically makes better decisions and doesn’t outright guzzle the military industrial complex. I smell feterman vibes on him.

      • UnspecificGravity@piefed.socialEnglish
        415·
        23 hours ago

        That would be nice. OF course, I EXPECT Republicans to nominate Nazis.

        When the Democrats do it too you have to kinda wonder what they are trying to achieve.

          • UnspecificGravity@piefed.socialEnglish
            412·
            23 hours ago

            I am hoping that people start paying better attention to their local politics so that we can end up with fewer cases where we have one fascist running against another fascist because both parties are funded by the same corporate donors what have an interest in making sure the government remains captured by their interests.