Spare Me the Lecture on Graham Platner

I’ve spent a week watching people line up to tell me Graham Platner is too compromised for the United States Senate. And I keep thinking about the people already in it.

While Israel was dropping white phosphorus on people in Lebanon, the New York Times called it a munition that “can be extremely harmful.” White phosphorus burns through skin to the bone. They called it harmful. Like cholesterol. Like skipping the gym.

This is the same paper that spent three or four months interviewing dozens of women who dated Graham Platner, hunting for anything to disqualify him. White phosphorus gets softened to “extremely harmful.” A man’s private life gets a microscope.

Because that’s what this is. They’ve taken a candidate’s personal struggles and made them the test of whether he’s fit to serve. Relationships that ended badly. Texts he regrets. The years he spent drinking, trying to outrun what he brought home from Ramadi and Fallujah. He’s a Marine who came back with PTSD and a drinking problem and did the work to come out the other side. That’s not a disqualification. In most of America that’s the story of a man growing up. But run for office as a working class guy and every private wound becomes a headline.

Sure, sexting with a woman while you’re married isn’t admirable. But that’s never been the test of whether someone can be trusted with power.

The test is how you conduct yourself when you have it. And by that test, the Senate we’ve got right now is morally bankrupt. Our media holds up those senators as moral and dignified while they sit in a hearing and debate the merits of making our military bunk mates with the military of a genocidal government. That gets called sober and serious. Just policy. Just pragmatism. Working hand in hand with people committing war crimes is just statesmanship.

Chuck Schumer voted for the war in Iraq and hundreds of thousands died. He didn’t lose his leadership or his reputation as a statesman because he didn’t personally drop the bomb. Now he leads the Senate Democrats, and he’s never been scrutinized like Platner. He was just part of the machine—he’s still part of the machine—and nobody in the machine is ever responsible.

Of course it isn’t just Schumer. Dozens of Senators, in both parties, voted for that war and fund all of our wars, and they’ve never answered for a single death. Platner, though. Platner pressed send. Platner was “unsettling.”

I don’t feel betrayed by Platner. I feel betrayed by the people sitting in judgment of him. John Yoo wrote the legal memos that authorized torture, and he teaches law at Berkeley. Perfectly acceptable stuff. But a man’s text messages have got the same people clutching at their pearls. If they want to talk about morality, let’s go. Let’s talk about yelling at a girlfriend, and then about funding the death of twenty thousand kids.

These are the Senators that Graham Platner isn’t fit to sit beside. They’re quiet or cheering, while we starve ordinary Cubans to force a regime change. They were quiet while we bombed Caracas and kidnapped a sitting head of state. They’re quiet while we blow boats out of the water in the Caribbean and kill everyone aboard because maybe there are drugs and maybe there aren’t. They were quiet when a school full of girls got hit in the opening hours of our war on Iran, 165 children dead, and the official position of the US government is that we’re still investigating whether it was us.

A few weeks ago Israel seized an aid flotilla in international waters, and its national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, posted video of himself taunting zip-tied activists forced to kneel on the ground. At least fifteen later reported being sexually assaulted, including accounts of rape and forcible penetration with a handgun. Italian prosecutors opened an investigation, but over here it barely made the news.

You can do anything, as long as you do it with decorum. In a good suit. Without raising your voice. Respectable means funding your war crimes with class. But if your human struggle is leaked, you’re finished.

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He’s a Marine who came back with PTSD and a drinking problem and did the work to come out the other side. That’s not a disqualification. In most of America that’s the story of a man growing up. But run for office as a working class guy and every private wound becomes a headline.

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Platner calls the genocide a genocide. He says out loud that tens of thousands of Americans die every year because they can’t afford a doctor. He looks at our wars and our economy and names what they cost and who pays. That’s moral clarity, and it’s the one qualification many of our Senators can’t claim.

So spare me. Spare me the lecture about Graham Platner’s character.

He came home from a war these people voted for, faced down his own demons and came out clearer than the people judging him. He’s not the threat here.

The threat is a chamber full of millionaires with clean hands and bloody voting records. It’s the talking heads who treat a working class vet as a scandal and treat war criminals like colleagues.

Graham Platner is more likely than not to improve the morality of the United States Senate. That’s not a joke, and it’s not because the bar is low—though it is. It’s because he sees clearly what they’ve spent careers refusing to see. The US Senate could learn a thing or two.

Corbin Trent