r/moderatepolitics • u/TheWyldMan • 3d ago

News Article Graham Platner’s Wife Flagged Sexually Explicit Texts to His Senate Campaign

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/graham-platners-wife-flagged-sexually-explicit-texts-to-his-senate-campaign-628ec832?mod=e2tw
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u/DrVader314159 3d ago edited 2d ago

I really can’t give a crap about what Republicans think constitutes ethics after they elected Trump twice.

You want to talk about consent? How about you start with the fact that the president you elected has been held civilly liable for rape, has been accused by at least 28 women of sexual misconduct, brags about walking in on naked contestants at beauty pageants, cheated on his wife with a porn star, has regularly associated with convicted child sex offenders, and has repeatedly opposed releasing files about said convicted child sex offenders?

I’ll consider holding senate candidates to stricter ethical standards after Republicans gain the ability to hold the goddamn president to any standards at all. Platner’s indiscretions don’t rise to the level of a footnote on the resume of Republican politicians.

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u/WavesAndSaves 3d ago

Why are you bringing up Trump? This is about the Maine Senate race, a state that Trump has not won in any of his three Presidential elections. He didn't even win it in the 2016 primaries.

What relevance does Donald Trump have to any of this?

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u/TheWyldMan 3d ago

What relevance does Donald Trump have to any of this?

Also if the Dems are trying to position themselves as anti-Trump, using trump to excuse a downward slip in their own morals and behavior feels a bit hypocritical.

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u/DrVader314159 2d ago edited 2d ago

Bringing up ethics when it comes to Democrats but not Republicans, given the vast difference in the orders of magnitude of ethical violations, is also hypocritical.

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u/pomme17 2d ago

It's not about excusing it. The point is that Democrats spent years trying to uphold a "when they go low, we go high" standard while Republicans repeatedly rallied around a politician who treated those standards as a joke. And Republicans arguably benefited from it electorally.

You can call Democrats hypocrites, sure. But so what? It just doesn't matter anymore. After watching the norm that presidents and public officials should meet some basic standard of conduct get shattered over and over again with few consequences, people just stopped caring. The social contract was broken too many times. Not only was Trump rarely punished politically for it, millions of voters actively rewarded him for it because they saw him as more authentic, more honest, and more "real". At a certain point people stop believing there's any reason to hold one side to standards the other side openly rejects.

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u/PreviousCurrentThing 2d ago

The point is that Democrats spent years trying to uphold a "when they go low, we go high" standard while Republicans repeatedly rallied around a politician who treated those standards as a joke.

Did they, though? I know Michele Obama said that in a speech once, yet Democrats have been been way more vitriolic in the Trump era than I ever remember them being before. I think Republicans are still generally more hostile and vitriolic than Dems, but I wouldn't call the last 10 years the "high road."

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u/Sierren 2d ago

I think this is something Dems often miss. Democrat politicians live in this weird space where they have been far more vitriolic than their civility minded members think they've been, while also not being as vitriolic as their militant members want them to be. They are genuinely caught in the lukewarm position of saying things far too outrageous to be put in the high ground camp, while also shying away from going as far as the militants would want.

You can't call Trump a fascist then not treat him like a fascist. Calling him a fascist means they aren't the party of civility, because valuing civility precludes you from doing that. Not following through means that, if they think he's a fascist like they say, they're weak and ineffectual in the face of him. Dems are caught in this middle zone between these two positions that leaves them with the worst of both worlds.

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u/PreviousCurrentThing 2d ago

That's a really good point, one I don't think I'd ever thought about quite like that.

If you're a militant Dem or to the left of them, mainstream Dem rhetoric is going to be insufficient relative to your perceived danger of Trump and look like the "high road", even if on an objective measure the rhetoric is way more heated than it was in previous decades.

Thanks for the insight. I think that does somewhat reframe how I view this particular "high road" discourse.

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u/dragonmp93 2d ago

Sure, unlike anything else, cheating on your wife is truly the most morally abhorrent thing a human being can do.

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u/whatisthisshit7 2d ago

Spending energy purity testing Dems morality on something like cheating and not any of the other debatable unethical behaviors and beliefs is hilarious.

Like why don’t we spend this energy criticizing Dems in Congress who game the stock market or are donor shills?

(For the record, I don’t think we should be purity testing anyone, but it’s ridiculous that this is where people want to suddenly draw the line)

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u/dragonmp93 2d ago

Because Republicans are the one making a big fuzz about someone cheating on his wife.

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u/WavesAndSaves 2d ago

Who cares what Republicans think? What matters is what Maine voters think.

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u/Interesting_Total_98 2d ago

The criticism is mainly coming from Republicans. A cheating scandal is a lot less interesting to people in this day and age.

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u/dragonmp93 2d ago

You mean the same people that elected Susan "Deeply Concerned" Collins ?

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u/DrVader314159 3d ago

I don’t think one side needs to police themselves at their own expense when the other side won’t even pretend to, especially when one of their top offenders is the president.

All I care about at this point is how Platner will vote on issues that are important to me, should he be elected. Caring about personal ethics at the expense of electoral victory is thus a self-inflicted handicap and a luxury for Democrats that they should do away with till Republicans learn what “both sides” really means.

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u/MrStoneyBaloney 2d ago

He lowers the bar.

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u/thebennubird 2d ago

Come on bro