In the Washington Post yesterday, Platner’s former political director issued an op-ed headlined, “I know firsthand why Graham Platner shouldn’t be a U.S. Senator.” An excerpt:

If America wants a stronger democracy, elevating leaders with integrity is essential. Leaders with sound judgment and ethics. …Platner has shown us that he is not such a leader. He exhibits a pattern of dishonest behavior that is impossible to ignore. Despite being exposed by a series of scandals beginning last October, he kept assuring voters and the Democratic Party that there were no more skeletons in his closet. Then more emerged — the latest, in recent days, have involved former girlfriends’ serious accusations of physical mistreatment…Troubling posts kept surfacing. Politico ran a story with his online posts about political violence that were new to me. I started making calls, and someone sent me the full archive of his Reddit account. ….I submitted my resignation and made it public….after my departure, the campaign offered me $15,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement. I refused…I went on record with the New York Times. Platner and his campaign admitted the sexting occurred, but then he also denounced the reports as “journalistic malpractice” and “gossip from a former staffer” — me. He was upset, apparently, that I said he had sexted with as many as a dozen women when, his campaign clarified, it was only about half that many….

In the recent past, a piece like that would kill any candidacy dead. But it won’t, because Democrats supporting Platner are irredeemable. This, my friends, is today’s Democratic Party. When Akin made his head-exploding statement about rape, every Republican repudiated him. But here is what James Carville, the ruthless Machiavellian behind Bill Clinton’s rise, says about Platner:

“And you know if Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could work with Joseph Stalin — who, by the way, well, I’ll tell you this, he was a bad guy, a really bad guy, alright — then I can overlook a tattoo…We got a fucked up guy, who, he could be a hundred times more fucked up than he is. He’d never be as fucked up as what we got in Washington now anyway…Abraham Lincoln had to suspend habeas corpus. Why? Because he had to win a Goddamned war, OK? We got to win this.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is your Democratic Party. Carville compares Platner to Stalin, who murdered more people than Hitler, and equates taking over the Senate to winning the Civil War. Endorsing Graham Platner, defending him, voting for him, leave no room for ambiguity. These are all proof positive of the sick and dangerous mindset represented by Rationalization 31. The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now,” the motto of assassins, demagogues, revolutionaries and despots.

Graham Platner is a human smoking gun.