There's been a run on litmus paper among the leftists in recent years. Liberals must pass all kinds of tests in order to remain pure and chaste in the eyes of the activists who control the Democratic Party.
If you wish to remain in their good graces, you must accept boys in girls' locker rooms, boys on girls' sports teams, and abortion on demand. You must also agree that Donald Trump is a dictator, that he's trying to destroy democracy, and that he's a Nazi.
Oh, wait. I guess you can't call Trump a Nazi, when the leading Democratic Senate candidate in Maine proudly sported a "Totenkopf" (the SS "Death's Head") tattoo on his chest. The skull and crossbones imagery was popular among SS concentration camp guards — you know, the guys who led six million Jews into gas chambers.
Chris Queen covered the story about Maine's embattled Senate candidate Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo. Democrats have now made support for this kook into a litmus test. To be a party member in good standing, you must ignore all of his statements about blacks being poor tippers; that he claimed as he got older, he became a Communist; that he referred to all police as "bastards;" that he downplayed sexual assault in the military and blamed drunk women for their own rape; and that he said he hated puppies and kittens.
I guess that last statement about the puppies and kittens was sort of a fib, but the rest was all true. And Democrats around the country are like the old woman who swallowed a spider: They're forced to "wriggle and jiggle and tickle" until they're twisted up in so many Gordian Knots, Alexander the Great couldn't cut through them.
“Voters are willing to absorb a certain amount of negativity in a candidate's personal life in order for it to advance their policy preferences,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
Related: The Democrats’ Civil War Is Funded by Fantasies
"Hold your nose and vote" is not a novel electoral strategy, but in today's hyper-partisan atmosphere, anything short of a murder charge is probably acceptable to partisans.
Platner's padrino, socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is a good example of the Democrats' ability to tolerate a lot of sewage in their party. He is standing four-square behind the working-class hero, the oyster farmer who attended an elite, $75,000-a-year boarding school and claims he will "fight for the working man."
Sanders made an appearance on "The Axios Show" and blamed the media for giving Platner the Nazi tattoo and hypnotizing him to say all those horrible things about women, blacks, and police officers.
"I'm not overly impressed by a squad of media running around saying, 'What do you think about the tattoo on Graham Platner's chest,’" Sanders told Axios.
Obviously, they should just shut up, sit down, and obey.
Despite the disarray, Sanders is doubling down on his support of Platner, who is contesting a crowded field. He told the outlet that Platner "went into a dark period in his life" regarding the online posts.
"I suspect that Graham Platner is not the only American to have gone through a dark period," Sanders said. "What he did was he expressed his darkness on the internet. Probably not a brilliant thing to do, alright? And he said things that are stupid, things that were hurtful. He has apologized for them."
Oh, so he APOLOGIZED. Whew! For a minute there, I thought he wasn't sorry at all.
For many on the left, the gravelly voiced Platner represents what Democrats need in the current political moment: a plainspoken Marine adept at capturing attention and drawing in working-class voters Democrats have lost. He’s commanding big crowds as he campaigns across his home state, running on a platform of supporting Medicare for All and raising the federal minimum wage.
Others argue Platner’s comments and the revelation of his tattoo should be disqualifying and question how progressives would react if a Republican had faced the same revelations, though the GOP has faced similar questions about the muted response of some top conservatives to the disclosure of antisemitic and violent messages from a Young Republicans group chat.
That's how CNN plays the "bothsiderism" game. "They do it too, only worse" is the kind of argument you might hear in a sandbox from two five-year-olds. Instead, we see a formerly major cable news outlet flinging feces to supply cover for a kooky, self-proclaimed socialist whose lies about his origins and beliefs disqualified him from any office save eighth-grade class clown.
The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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