snip ...

I know a hit job when I read one. I should. I used to build them.

There was a version of me, years back, who could take a candidate's life, lay it out on a light table, and find the one frame that ruined them. You don't need the truth. You need a true-enough fragment, a sympathetic reporter, and a Democratic Party so terrified of its own shadow that it does the rest of the work for you. That was the whole game. We didn't beat Democrats. We handed them a mirror and a magnifying glass and let them disqualify themselves over a flaw, a mistake, a misstep, a college newspaper article, a tweet.

snip ...

So when the New York Times dropped its long, carefully sorrowful piece on Graham Platner last week, I read it the way a retired safecracker watches a heist movie.

And here's the thing. The hit fell short. I knew of the woman at its center, and she was

always one of the tribe. She was a Republican operative, a DC MAGA apparatchik who ran Ladies for Brett Kavanaugh. That was always going to sully the attack, and given she was once part of Ali Alexander's circle of CPAC freaks, I wondered how credulous the Times would be.

Turns out, not as credulous as MAGA hoped.

It fell short because the playbook only works on people who agree to play the victim, and this is a sweeping lesson for Democratic candidates. It fell short because Fifield expected the Times to print her accusations verbatim without giving Platner a chance to respond and offer both a rebuttal and the testimony of other women he'd dated.

The GOP's entire theory of Democratic candidates rests on one assumption: that the left will be so delicate, so morally fastidious, so desperate to be seen as clean that the faintest smudge on the campaign escutcheon becomes a death sentence. They repurposed Alinsky against Democrats decades ago: make the enemy live up to their own book of rules, because you know they can't, and you know they'll flinch first.

It's a beautiful con, and it only requires one thing to work: cowardice.

Postscript: Thanks for the recommendations.

snip ...

Working-class Maine is the real Maine. The boatyards, the night shifts, the people doing the hard math on the family budget at the kitchen table in January. Platner knows them because he is one of them. Collins stopped knowing them somewhere around her second term, around the time "I'm concerned" and "pearl clutching" became a gag.

She is hard to beat. I won't pretend otherwise. But her clucking about Platner's personal life doesn't begin to offset the grim arithmetic she's responsible for. Mainers are hurting, and she has empowered the man causing it at every single step, then furrowed her brow about it afterward, every time, on schedule.

The hit job assumed we'd flinch. Turns out the flaw in the plan was the same flaw it's always been. They forgot what a man looks like when he refuses to apologize for being human, and instead apologizes only for what actually warrants it.

That man is harder to kill than they think.

#5 "Annoying" is only dependent on which side of the argument you find yourself.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

#7 Please stop sullying this thread with your infantile and asinine comments, "effete."

#9 STFU ... for your benefit ...

#9 The man-child "Effectposer" farts out, "...like Coriolanus keeps asserting..."

Coriolanus is an a$$hole, a complete piece of s&*t coward, and someone who hates Jews, Democrats, and progressives/liberals.

So, do tell me, man-child "effete," why the f*ck should I care what Coriolanus keeps asserting?

Oh, there are certain "posters" here who swoon over his "I play bridge" and "I take 3 weeks to read a book, but look at how smart I am" line of bullsh*t.

And I already called out the fact that he actually equated the Hamas terrorist attack on 07-Sep-2023 with Ukrainians fighting Russians..

...yep, the a$$hole, a complete piece of s&*t coward, Coriolanus actually equated Hamas terrorists with Ukrainians fighting Russians.

Yeah.

F*ck that.

And thank you for your very kind recommendations.