…since he (it?) sure has been speaking for a lot of Democratic Party candidates…if you can believe its (his?) alleged victims.
Of course, you can’t.
In California, the leading candidate to replace Gavin Newsom as governor, Rep. Katie Porter, has been bedeviled by emerging videos of her abusing staffers, refusing to tolerate probing questions from interviewers, and generally acting like a witch on wheels (It’s Halloween!) Porter and her political allies insist that these clips don’t show “the real Katie,’ which is comforting, since that demon impersonating Porter just stops short of spewing green vomit.
Then there is Jay Jones, who in his passionate apology last night (during a televised debate between the two candidates for Attorney General in Virginia) characterized his extended discourse on how much he wants to murder his political opponents and see their children dead as a “mistake.”
I think I recall the fully exorcised Regan, when an interviewer asked her to explain her comment to Father Damien, “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!” replying that “It was a mistake.” I always wondered: how was it a mistake? Damien’s mother wasn’t sucking cocks in Hell? She was sucking cocks somewhere else? No, I’m pretty sure what the girl meant was that Pazuzu, the demon who was possessing her at the time, goofed by saying that and thus revealing that he (it?) was in control.
Ah, but the Democratic candidate who has apparently been most flagrantly occupied by Pazuzu is the Donkeys’ candidate for Governor of Maine, Graham Platner. CNN, which has been periodically practicing objective journalism here and there, confronted Platner with his amazing (and now deleted) posts on Reddit between 2020 and 2022, like
- “Fuck these cops.”
- “Cops are bastards… All of them, in fact.”
- Responding to someone who wrote, “White people aren’t as racist or stupid as Trump thinks,” by writing, “Living in white rural America, I’m afraid to tell you they actually are.”
- Describing himself as a “communist.”
- “I’m a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist these days. After the war, I’ve pretty much stopped believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got me there in the first place. Still got the guns though, I don’t trust the fascists to act politely.”
- “I did used to love America, or at least the idea of it. These days I’m pretty disgusted by it all.”
Nice! But Platner now miraculously denies that he believes any of that, saying that those sentiments don’t reflect “who I am today.” If he’s telling the truth, and I don’t believe him for a minute, the only thing that could explain such a complete reversal is an exorcism.
Ethics Alarms 
Character is what you do when you think no one is watching.
It’s also who you are when you are on the internet or in text messages, private or not.
Platner is merely the prog flavor of the month (after Zohran).
Maine is a blue state but it’s old-school Dem blue. Platner may make the state’s noisy progs (and NPR, by the way) swoon, but I suspect he’ll be a bridge too far for Maine’s electorate.
My prediction is that the Maine Democratic Party will anoint current governor Janet Mills – a long-time party hack who’s been a rather wretched governor. But Mills knows where all the bodies are buried (and who buried them). So it’ll come down to her and Susan Collins.
And Collins will prevail. Maybe by the smallest margin she’s had, but she’ll still get the win. Maine’s Democrats like her more than the state’s real conservatives do.
All of that is what I have assumed, but goodness gracious, is the Maine Democratic talent pool that thin?
Talent? Not much. Pool? Plenty large enough.
Part of the challenge is that the state has strict term limits for its both senators and house members – four two-year terms max for each. If you want to stay in the legislature, you either run for the other chamber or wait two years to become eligible again. This means that leadership skills generally aren’t well developed. It also means that legislators who term out often get placed in lobbying and NGOs based in Augusta – and given the lack of real legislative skill among the Members, those are the places where much of the legislation is actually drafted. And that’s where the true progressives like to hang out. It’s easy money, much of it coming in from out of state.
The other problem is that most of the state’s skilled Republicans choose to engage in honest work instead of getting sucked into politics.
Add in the fact that the Dems and their prog fellow travelers managed to force through ranked choice voting, coupled with monolithic (blue) press in the state, and Maine is likely to stay blue for a good long while. But old school blue, at least in the short term.
The long knives are already out for Platner.