I wish I didn’t have to write about this nauseating mess at all. It is, however, the most throbbing of the current ethics matters in the news, and, as Hymen Roth says, “This is the life we have chosen!”

1. This is getting to be a habit with Democrats, isn’t it? Use democratic, sort of, means to pick a candidate whom they then drive out of the campaign so they can duck any democratic process whatsoever and pick the next candidate as the Politburo chose Soviet Premiers. Nice! Platner won the primary, and anyone who voted for him is a certifiable irresponsible fool. They have no standing to claim they were duped or deceived. The party and its sheep should have to live with their incompetence. George Will called it “condign justice.”

2. Platner has to step aside voluntarily by 5 p.m. July 13 for his party to replace him. As of now, Platner has only committed to pausing his campaign, whatever that means. If he does withdraw, the law gives Democrats until July 27 to choose a replacement.

3. Here’s how serious Democrats are about governance: one of the potential Senators being floated to replace Platner is actor Patrick Dempsey. Dempsey became a TV star after being a B+ list movie player in “Grey’s Anatomy,” a prime time medical soap opera. He is more qualified than Platner for a Senate seat, but then who isn’t? Dempsey’s a high school grad, an expert juggler, a professional caliber auto racer, and has great hair. Sure, why not? If it works, the Democrats can finally nominate Oprah for President.

“If Platner fooled you, maybe you should find something to do with your life besides writing columns about politics. Because the U.S. political landscape is full of creeps, cretins, con artists, crooks, and cads of every kind, and it always will be. If the media has any useful role to play in our system, it is to look beyond the spin and the campaign-crafted image and to tell the world who these candidates really are, warts and all, so the electorate can make an informed choice.”

—-Jim Geraghty in The National Review in a long, thorough and detailed review of just how obvious it should have been to Democrats and journalists (but I repeat myself) that Graham Platner is “an awful human being, and that fact was about as hidden as a supernova from the start.”

The specific political columnist Geraghty was admonishing is the New York Times’ hard left-biased, consistently unethical hack pundit Michelle Goldberg, one of my favorite examples of the kind of flagrant propagandist the New York Times gives its platform to. [Goldberg’s EA dossier is here.] I haven’t bothered to write about her for a while: The Julie Principle. In a classic “Oopsie!” column, she wrote,

“Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.”

Geraghty’s review of just how smoky the “Platner is a world-class creep” gun was is instructive. That anyone endorsed the guy or believed the lame narrative that he was a “changed man” should make the most knee-jerk Democrat think hard about how trustworthy, honest, and, let’s face it, smart this party and its leadership is. Geraghty makes showing their confirmation bias, corruption and contrived blindness look so easy because it is easy: