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.

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“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.

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“I am calling on average Americans everywhere to peacefully exercise your First Amendment rights en masse every day until this administration is removed and our democratic republic is restored,” US Air Force major Jason Watson said in a  public speech, delivered in uniform, before standing on the steps of the US Capitol with a sign reading “IMPEACH CONVICT REMOVE.”

Many Americans enthusiastically agree with the positions Watson  expressed. Many other Americans vehemently disagree.

Neither the agreement nor the disagreement matter to whether what he did was good, bad, right, or wrong.

Here’s what does matter:

Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids US military officers to use “contemptuous words against the President.”

US Department of Defense Directive 1344.10 — issued under Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate the conduct, discipline, and uniform wear of the armed forces and nearly 20 years old in its current form — forbids active duty military personnel to wear their uniforms, or make speeches, at political events.

No one forced Major Watson to accept an Air Force Commission.

That choice — and the choice to be bound by the UCMJ and by DOD directives — was Major Watson’s and Major Watson’s alone.

So was the choice to violate the rules he chose, of his own free will, to be bound by.

While I’m on record as noticing that the Constitution doesn’t seem to matter much to those who rule us when those rulers find its strictures inconvenient, one of its features does make a good deal of sense for nearly any social or political system.

That feature is requiring that civilians control the armed forces rather than vice versa.

In any given week, you’re likely to come across multiple news stories concerning actual or attempted coups d’etat in various countries around the world.

A coup happens when the military (or some other branch of the “security state”) deposes civilian leadership and installs new leadership of its choice.

That’s almost always followed by violence as the new rulers act to suppress public unrest and pursue unpopular policies.

We’ve probably had at least one coup here in the US: In 1963, president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, almost certainly with the involvement of the CIA and other regime elements, and almost certainly for the express purpose of letting those elements get back to escalating an overt war in Vietnam and covert wars in Latin America.

The rest of that decade saw more political assassinations, social tumult that included literal “cities on fire,” law enforcement officers murdering civil rights activists and National Guard troops murdering college students with impunity, nearly 60,000 US and millions of Vietnamese deaths … the list goes on and on, and significant features of the coup-installed regime persist to this very day.

Forbidding military personnel to engage in politics, especially while in uniform, may only be a bare minimum standard when it comes to  preventing coups, but it IS such a bare minimum standard.

If you’re in the military, but would rather be involved in politics, hang the uniform up, not on.

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.

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