Platner Media Stans In Stages Of Grief: Denial, Anger, Anthony Weiner, Depression, Acceptance

It's very predictable.

Your Wonkette wishes to issue a correction. On Wednesday, burly sex fiend Graham Platner announced in a rambling and self-pitying video that he is withdrawing from the race for a Maine Senate seat after an ex-girlfriend accused him of sexually assaulting her. At the time, we wrote that Platner “dawdled as long as possible” in making this decision.

It turns out, he could dawdle quite a bit longer! On Thursday, news leaked that Platner was for no reason waiting until Monday to file the paperwork with Maine’s Secretary of State that will officially remove his name from the ballot. That’s four extra days of dawdling! We regret the error.

Then, while we were writing this, he changed his mind and officially withdrew after all.

Here is why Platner’s putting off filing the paperwork made some people nervous: After 5 P.M. Monday, Democrats could not have legally replaced him on the ballot. They would have been stuck with the world’s horniest oysterman through November.

And to be clear, there was no reason to delay. The Maine secretary of state said Platner could file the paperwork by email. He could do that at any moment and then go spend the rest of his day debarnacling the hull of his boat or yelling about AIPAC or whatever.

He initially chose to drag it out instead. Maybe he thought he could spend the weekend negotiating more terms of surrender with the Democratic Party. Maybe he thought some miracle might occur over the weekend that saved his campaign. Maybe he was just having a childish snit over being forced out of the race.

But none of this stopped some of Platner’s fans from fighting on like Japanese soldiers still holding Pacific islands in the 1970s because nobody ever bothered to tell them the war was over.

For example, here is reporter Ryan Grim inventing a journalistic “scandal” in which POLITICO in its original story left out a piece of information that ... in no way changes anything about Platner’s alleged actions:

See, what’s important here is that no matter what flip comment she might have made about needing her tushie massaged, she told Platner not to come over, he did anyway and forced himself on her (ALLEGEDLY). Grim’s implication here was very clear. It was so clear that his own outlet, which he was retweeting, felt the need to apologize:

Hilariously, by Friday Grim had moved on to the “But but but Cal Cunningham!” stage of grief:

For those of you who don’t remember Cal Cunningham, he was the idiot who tanked his campaign for a North Carolina Senate seat when it came out that he had been sexting a woman who was not his wife, a relationship that eventually became a physical affair. There are subtle differences though, and we mean subtle very sarcastically.

For one, Cunningham started this affair during the campaign. So while you could yell at his campaign manager for not knowing her candidate had started cheating if you’re feeling ungracious, you can’t say she failed to vet him thoroughly before signing on. Unless he had a string of floozies he had been having other affairs with, which he has never admitted to.

But more importantly, Cunningham’s was a consensual affair! He was not accused of going over to this woman’s house after she told him not to come over and then raping her. And there was no pattern of past bad behavior towards women for which this latest accusation could serve as an exclamation point.

Graham Platner Pretty Sure The Establishment Was Asking For It

We’re singling out Grim, but Lord knows there were plenty of others for whom Platner’s history, sexual assault allegations, and obvious poor judgment were not dealbreakers. But flail harder, guys, maybe you’ll go hard enough to bring your credibility back.

This all just gets dumber the more we read about it. One of the people who recruited Platner was named Dan Moraff, an organizer who is the grandson of a founder of Toys “R” Us and a graduate of Brown and Yale Law School. Now, keep that in mind when you read what we learned from Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times about the process that had a couple of out-of-state political operatives recruiting Platner to run:

Moraff, this wealthy Ivy League boy, and his partner almost literally went window-shopping for a burly white guy who fit their paint-by-numbers stereotype of a gruff, populist white workingman. They saw tattoos and a beard and went nuts. Then they didn’t bother to dig nearly deep enough into the guy’s history to find any dirt that could derail him. And boy was there plenty of it.

Meanwhile, we spent months being lectured by the likes of the Pod Save America boys that the Democrats need to stop continually nominating cookie-cutter candidates recruited by their Ivy League classmates. Than an Ivy League guy tried recruiting a working-class guy and totally shit the bed.

How insulting and condescending. We don’t know if people in Maine are offended, but we very much are.

And to top it all off, Moraff has his own history:

Congresswoman Summer Lee barred Moraff from her 2022 congressional campaign after receiving at least three complaints of sexual misconduct against Moraff.

Ah, yeah. No wonder he had a blind spot where Platner’s behavior was concerned.

In short, for all the complaints about how voters are sick of candidates who are “vat-grown,” to use Maroff’s phrasing, Graham Platner was grown in his own sort of vat. At least that’s what his recruiters saw when they looked at him, whether they realized it or not.

There is plenty of room to go around for this fuckup, and maybe one day the Platner diehards will accept that a lot of it falls on him. Probably not any day soon, though.

[Portland Press Herald / NYT / Payday Report]

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