Why They Could Get Away With What Graham Platner Can't

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​Why They Could Get Away With What Graham Platner Can't

       As of tonight, Wednesday, July 8, it's over for Graham Platner, the magnetic progressive populist oyster farmer who became the Democratic Party's Great Blue Collar Hope for winning back the United States Senate.

      As the whole country by now knows, Platner was accused by a former girlfriend of entering her house and raping her while he was blackout drunk, a state caused by a vast intake of alcohol during which a person is capable of walking, talking, and committing rape or other forms of violence, but incapable of remembering later what transpired while they were intoxicated.
      Graham Platner denies he raped his girlfriend. That's likely because he doesn't remember raping her. 
        True, Platner had a history of alcohol abuse, ill treatment of women, and an erased Nazi tattoo. But those of us who  were rooting for him were willing to overlook his sins of the past because his seemed to be a story of redemption, of going and sinning no more, of a turning away from his reprobate past and a recovery from the PTSD that stoked his substance abuse and the subsequent abusive behavior it caused.
        But rape, even committed while in a state of trauma-induced blackout drunkenness, and even if it happened years ago, was a sin too far, an aggression that wouldn't stand. This was disheartening for those of us who saw in Graham Platner not only a chance of winning back the Senate for the Democrats but a champion for progressive policies on issues such as healthcare, housing, climate, education, billionaires paying their fair share in taxes, and more. 
        But what Graham Platner stands for now doesn't matter.  Democrats, myself  included, have dropped and renounced him. His political career is dead, along with our hopes for what he might have accomplished.
        Still, I found myself pondering with my mate Tom how it could be that someone like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth could get away with having paid off a woman he drugged and raped in a hotel room and, according to former coworkers, frequently coming in drunk to his job at Fox News. Not to mention his Nazi tattoos, which he didn't even feel the need to remove.

   Or how RFK Jr. could breeze by an accusation of sexual assault by his children's nanny with the excuse that he wasn't a choirboy.​

      Or how the accusations by dozens of women of rape and sexual assault against  Donald Trump didn't keep him from being twice elected President of the United States, or continually loved by his MAGA base and supported by his Party faithful.

      "It's this simple," said Tom. "These days a Republican can get away with it. A Democrat can't. The Democrats just won't put up with that kind of behavior in their leaders anymore."
         I guess that's why I'm a Democrat.