On June 9, Graham Platner won the Democratic Party’s nomination for US Senate from Maine with 72.1% of the primary vote. On July 10, Platner withdrew from the race, presumably due to popular demand by the same voters who nominated him.

I’m tempted to a bit of schadenfreude toward those voters.

This was not a case of “seems like a really good guy, very consistent, upright citizen … oh my God, I had no idea!”

Platner’s entire short political career — his whole adult life, in fact — resembles a locomotive, on fire, pulling boxcars stuffed full of dynamite, accelerating down tracks that terminate at a children’s playground.

While the final straw was an allegation of rape, it’s not like he hadn’t already been credibly and multiple times been accused of poor behavior toward women, ranging from marital infidelity to physical assault.

Until the rape allegation, he was able to shrug that kind of thing off with a plea of PTSD from his military career. Speaking of which:

As a candidate, Platner told his opponent, US Senator Susan Collins, “You voted to send me to Iraq. Did you not learn anything from that experience?”

It’s a reasonable question, but it rings a little hollow from someone who wasn’t drafted, who joined up after the wars he fought had begun, and who kept coming back for more. Platner spent four years in the Marine Corps, then returned for four more in the National Guard, then worked as a mercenary (“security contractor”), for a total of three combat tours in Iraq and a six-month deployment to Afghanistan.

I’m sympathetic to veteran regret (got a bit of that myself), but it seems to have taken that regret a long time to develop despite  severe negative consequences, including the PTSD he tries to blame all his bad behavior on.

I guess Platner is a slow learner. It supposedly took him 19 years to figure out that he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

Or maybe, just maybe, Platner is an opportunist who figured, correctly, that Maine’s Democratic voters were gullible enough to overlook the obvious flaws in a candidate who sold himself as an “outsider” and a “populist.”

And that worked out … for a little while, anyway.

There’s an old saying: “You can’t cheat an honest man.”

Are voters honest? They keep falling for politicians who turn out to be even worse than average … and then complaining endlessly about it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“The United States and Iran exchanged fire for a second consecutive night on Thursday [July 9],” the New York Times reports, “extending a pattern of hostilities that has all but collapsed their fragile truce and left the Middle East suspended between war and peace.”

Let’s be honest here: There was no real “truce,” “fragile” or otherwise.

Sure, there was a bit of a lull for further negotiations after US president Donald Trump signed the instrument of US surrender (“Memorandum of Understanding”), but we’ve seen continuous minor flare-ups ever since and it was clear before the ink dried on the MOU that the US had no intention of surrendering the spoils of victory — in particular, control of the Strait of Hormuz — to the winners.

As for even a supposed “ceasefire,” Trump now says that’s “over.”

According to US law, it’s the war that’s over — and the law clearly says so twice.

The initial US attack on Iran was wholly illegal. Per the US Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, and it had (and has) not done so.

But Congress waffled instead of acting … until June 23, when it passed a concurrent war powers resolution which again — above and beyond the requirements of the Constitution — formally and legally ended the war, clearly and unambiguously requiring Trump to withdraw all forces from the conflict.

Yet there those forces remain, continuing, illegally, to engage in hostilities with the Iranian regime over territory that is not and never has been a US possession of any kind.

If Congress owned anything resembling collective spine, every signpost along this road to fiasco would have read “this way to Trump’s impeachment and removal.” Waging an illegal war is, by any plausible definition, a “high crime” requiring that.

Yet there he remains, sitting in the Oval Office, flying on one version or another of Air Force One, hob-nobbing with (and insulting) fellow “world leaders,” etc.

He claims the Iranian regime is ringing his phone off the hook, begging for a “deal.”

In reality, I suspect any Iranian phone message summarizes as “بازنده میگه چی؟”

In English: “Loser says what?”

Every American continues to pay at the gas pump and the grocery store for this idiotic, illegal war. Some Americans have paid, and more may pay, with their lives before it’s over.

And when it’s over, the US will be worse off than before.

End this nonsense now.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker proclaims that “America Is the Land of Endless Choice, Except in Politics” (June 30).  Yet he wants Lady Liberty to be pregnant with just a little bit more of it.

Baker doesn’t have to work up a sweat to find more economic options in the US than the EU.  His attempt to ask for a steak to be cooked medium rare over there being seen as outlandish as a request to “bring me the cow” may not be the most universally representative of anecdotes.  For many Americans, such fine dining may be as fantastically out of reach as Charlie Chaplin’s dream in Modern Times of being able to get fresh milk immediately from a bovine conveniently passing by his front door.  And a perusal beyond the superhero stacks at his local comic shop might turn up second varieties imported from Europe, such as an Italian retelling of Dante’s Inferno starring Mickey Mouse and Goofy.

Yet Baker finds the most extra, if not the best, menu among the little Caesars of Euro-politicians, one in which “you can have your politics served Communist, nationalist, Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, Green, Socialist, conservative, liberal and anything in between.”  Across the pond, he hopes instead merely to be able to have just enough extra options to be able to “choose a government that is sane, honest, patriotic, responsible and worthy.”

Baker may see opening the door too wide as unleashing such socialist sects violently from Pandora’s box, but they have already left the stable.  As New York Times reviewer Walter Goodman noted of the various membership cards Ronald Radosh carried across most of the twentieth century as recounted in his memoir COMMIES: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left: “It takes some dedication to sort out one group from another, since they all seemed to be using ‘socialist’ in their titles.”

Baker frets that the Democrats may become “a party of graduate student activists” beholden to “ideas about economics that were discredited half a century ago.”  Radosh was among the graduate student activists who learned from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s William Appleman Williams to discredit the entire framework of viewing modern liberalism as “a popular movement, opposed by business … to challenge the one-sided power of large corporate business” rather than “the ideology of dominant business groups” which “have in reality favored state intervention to supervise corporate activity” (as Radosh described in Debs, an account of a socialist leader who “did not favor any form of regulatory activity”).

Big business versus big government is the ultimate false dichotomy of our time.  Championing the former won’t break the cycle that allows both to marginalize the scope of (and solutions emerging from) voluntary cooperation, decentralized association, and individual freedom.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Politics is Just Another Word for No Freedom Left to Choose” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 9, 2026