"While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke..."

"... I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was 'nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.' If anything, he seems to be significantly worse...."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster" (NYT).

That article she wrote and links to came out last October. It sets out to prop him up as he was falling long before the primary: "Platner is the oyster farmer and former Marine with a baritone voice and a Bernie Sanders endorsement who this fall came seemingly out of nowhere to capture progressive hearts nationwide. Recently, a barrage of ugly revelations made it look like perhaps all the hope invested in him had been misplaced...."

Hearts. Hope.

Here's Goldberg, back in October, explaining that Nazi tattoo:

"He wanted revenge — revenge against society because he blamed society for all his troubles."

"You’ll hear that in 2024, the defendant was lonely, with no real friends.... He lived by himself and was withdrawn."

Said the prosecutor, quoted in "Man accused of starting LA wildfire ‘wanted revenge on the rich’/Jonathan Rinderknecht is on trial for arson, facing allegations that he was behind the devastating fires that consumed thousands of homes" (London Times).

"In 1968, Janet Malcolm visited a new showroom for high-end furniture that was, she wrote, among 'the most beautiful and interesting' in New York."

"The venue was designed by Warren Platner, an architect who himself designed furniture; Donald Trump would later acquire a set of his chairs, and sounded gratified when, during an interview in 2010, a reporter from the Times recognized them. Platner’s son, Bronson, went into law, in Maine; his son Graham studied at Hotchkiss, a tony boarding school in Connecticut, though he hated it, skipped classes, and was quickly kicked out. Graham transferred to a different private school closer to home, where he starred in a production of 'My Fair Lady.' He played Henry Higgins, the haughty phonetician who teaches a lower-class flower girl to speak proper...."

Those are the opening lines of an essay by Jon Allsop titled "The Changing Face of 'Authenticity' in Politics/What Graham Platner’s scandal-plagued Senate run says about a tired cliché" (The New Yorker).

Here's how Platner entered the political arena, last summer:

Allsop ponders "authenticity":

"It's more expensive than any car I ever bought, but I can't drive around in my face."

Said Rosie O'Donnell, about the facelift she'd always said she'd never get.

Everyone can see it looks phenomenal. But don't try this with your local surgeon. What she got is "very expensive." 

Is it okay to look like privilege?

Can we all just say she looks great? Pick the answer closest to what you think.

Never. She's Rosie O'Donell. That's always ugly.

Let's be empathetic to those who are so deeply troubled by Rosie that they can't see what is true.

She's objectively much improved, and everyone ought to acknowledge what is true.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Dirtbagism.

I'm reading "Graham Platner and the Rise of the ‘Dirtbag’ Democrat/And what the Maine candidate reveals about politics today" in the NYT.

That's long, so let's jump to the place where the word "dirtbag" is thrown into the mix:

Michelle Cottle: And honestly, is it even fair to compare Platner to somebody like Paxton or Trump? 

Jamelle Bouie: You know, I don’t think it’s fair. And I say that because, so far, what we’ve learned about Platner is that, for lack of a better term, he’s kind of a dirtbag. Just a dirtbaggy kind of guy.... That’s versus Trump, who isn’t just a reprehensible person, but is actively engaged in harming other people in his private life, right? And I’d say the same for Paxton: not just a slimy guy, but a guy whose modus operandi, as a human being, is to try to dominate the people around him in really ugly ways. And so, I think Platner is more on the John Fetterman continuum than he is on the Trump continuum, which is just, eh, kind of dirtbaggy.

Cottle: OK, so I want to drill down just a little bit more....

The drilling down does not explore the concept of dirtbagism. Cottle was swooping in to take the conversation away from that, even though the headline writer saw the click-bait value of the word. In the conversation, "dirtbag" never reappears.

I asked Grok "how the word 'dirtbag' is being deployed what kind of people use that term and why" and got quickly tracked into the subject of the "dirtbag left." There's this New Yorker article from last October: "What Explains Graham Platner’s Popularity? The U.S. Senate candidate from Maine seems like the embodiment of the dirtbag left. But there’s another way to understand his appeal." Excerpt:

"May I say, well done in the Americas. You were superb, absolutely superb. Put that little ratbag in his place."

Said Rod Stewart, quoted in "Rod Stewart hails King Charles for putting ‘ratbag’ Trump ‘in his place’/The singer made the remark during a line-up at a 50th anniversary concert for the King’s Trust at the Royal Albert Hall, London" (London Times).

Did King Charles put Trump in his place? Maybe it's like that "bike rage" incident with Benedict Cumberbatch we were talking about yesterday. Two entirely nonviolent men stopped to exchange a few sharp words. 

The commenters over there at the London Times are going after Rod. Top-rated comment: "Rod Stewart put the King and Queen in a very embarrassing position by making political comments in a receiving line. It just shows he has no class whatsoever and doesn’t have the brains he was born with."

And: "Ah, Rod Stewart who made millions for being a hedonistic rockstar boasted about numerous, groupies, and rampant infidelity calling somebody else a 'ratbag' while shaking hand with the highest example of infidelity. Must have his picture in the dictionary next to hypocrite!"

Is this the first appearance of the word "ratbag" on this blog? No, it came up here, where I quoted the NYT obituary for Barry Humphries ("Dame Edna"). The NYT has printed "ratbag" a few times. In a 1984 piece about travel guidebooks, it has: "[I]n a section on 'picturesque patterns of speech'... the 'Maverick Guide to Australia' tells us that a bicyclist there is called a bikey, that to grizzle means to complain and that a ratbag is an eccentric character."

Well, Trump surely is an eccentric character. He should own it. Kind of cool too — isn't it? — in the American way of thinking — to have Rod Stewart calling you a "ratbag."

ADDED: Let's also consider the notion of putting someone "in their place." It reflects a background belief that people have a social rank or a station in life. For Rod Stewart — who, I hear, started from gasoline alley — to praise the King — a person of the highest rank — for putting someone "in their place" is pretty funny. And, we're told, the King just laughed. And didn't that put Rod in his place?

Take me back, carry me back down the gasoline alley where I started from....

"The worst part about AI is that it is giving the experience of competence to people who are stupid."

"These people who now are firing off 30-page Claude AI slop documents and they think they're smart and brilliant. They're following up with you, asking you to read them, and you check them out. None of it makes sense! These are people who, before AI, they were incompetent people. They couldn't even make a document, they couldn't write a good 2-page document, they couldn't organize their thoughts. Because they couldn't do that, they actually couldn't produce any output. And now they can produce output. They produce extremely long outputs that are terrible. It's because they, for the first time in their lives, have the experience of competence. It's making the rest of us miserable."

Says Jake Abrams, on TikTok. I prefer to read his comment as text, but you might want to observe him and see if it affects your reaction to what he's saying. I saw this first as video and decided to blog it but took the trouble to make a transcript because I find the video distracting. He drops the microphone at the end.

Clearly, he thinks he is one of the smart people. He doesn't like the stupid people horning in on the space that belonged to him and his people — you know, the ones who were always producing documents that gave off the impression of competence. Have those documents been making much sense? Were they concise? 

Now that everyone can produce long documents that look good superficially, what's going to happen? If people continue to read documents, will they separate out the search for what was written by A.I. or will they judge everything skeptically? It's more likely that they will use A.I. to read the documents and to assess them critically. In the end, who's going to feel that they are "smart and brilliant"? Is Abrams afraid that those he wants to view as stupid, perhaps because they didn't go to a good college, are going to play the game of using A.I. better than those who thought they had it made because they did go to a good college?

We'll see who picks up the tools and uses them best. 

Tim Dillon explains Melania's Epstein speech.

I like the detail in the interpretation of the line, "Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach."

Dillon translates: "Here's what she's telling you: We are rich.... I'm wealthy and I'm attractive. Many of you aren't either one of those things.

"Wealthy Republicans were first to form a daisy chain of nonprofit giving to funnel anonymous money into the political system."

"But recently, this path has been exploited to a far greater degree by wealthy Democrats, many of whom are seeking anonymity to avoid reprisals from President Trump, even as they donate tens of millions of dollars at a time to defeat Republican candidates. In the 2024 election cycle, over 40 percent of the nearly $2 billion raised by the largest Democratic super PACs came from entities that did not disclose their donors, according to the Times analysis. That was twice the rate of the largest Republican super PACs that cycle. Alexandra Acker-Lyons, an adviser to several prominent progressive donors, said that liberals had to use everything in the campaign finance arsenal to fight Mr. Trump. 'When we get power, we can change all of the rules so that everyone plays nice,' Ms. Acker-Lyons said. 'But until we have power, we can’t do that.'"

From "Wealthy Donors Are Hiding Political Money in Secretive Nonprofits/Using philanthropy for campaign donations is illegal. But an exception for some nonprofits has allowed Democratic billionaires like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg to remain anonymous when they want to play politics" (NYT)(gift link).

"Maybe Mr. Adams was an early Trump supporter because 'Dilbert' was itself proto-MAGA."

"The strip’s everyday resentments and cynicism added up to a now-familiar worldview. 'There’s no such thing as expertise. It just doesn’t exist,' Mr. Adams said. Mr. Adams thought this extended even to issues like international trade. 'In these big, complicated situations, no one really knows if we have a good deal. It’s best just to negotiate from ignorance and hope the other side gives in,' he told me. 'In the real world there is a fog. In a world where nobody knows, the loudest person is going to get the most.' From his point of view, I had lived so long among the well-credentialed languishing in abstract thoughts that I was fooled into thinking complex problems required expert solutions. 'In your movie,' by which he meant my perception of reality, 'there’s a big, incompetent guy who doesn’t know the details,' he told me. 'I’m telling you it’s the best thing possible. When President Trump acts without all the information and his facts are not accurate, he’s operating on a higher level, not a lower level. He’s operating in the real world.'"

Writes Joel Stein, in "'Dilbert' Was Always MAGA" (NYT).

"People find anything offensive, but we pushed back and we won. So f*** them. Until the next time. They haven’t gone away."

"They’re just licking their wounds. They’ll be back with something madder. But remember who it is next time? Right? It’s always these sort of educated, middle-class, privileged, elitist, sort of people telling ordinary working-class people what they can and can’t do and say and laugh, not realizing how important comedy is to ordinary people."

Said Ricky Gervais, in his new Netflix special, "Mortality," quoted in "Ricky Gervais Uses Netflix Special To Declare Victory Over 'Virtue Signalling' Elites Who 'Find Anything Offensive' — And Reveals Golden Globes Gag He Bottled" (Deadline).

Also: "The most annoying thing about virtue signalling is people being smug about having the morality of the age. You’re what you’re like because of where you are and when you are.... I’m willing to admit that if I’d have been born 300 years ago and I was white and wealthy, I’d have probably owned slaves...."

And then — I'm saying this based on having watched the show — he proceeds to fake-fawn over himself for being a particularly benevolent slaveholder. He virtue-signals within the slaveholder role. And the implication is that's what today's virtue-signalers are doing, praising themselves within the standards of the time but blind to the larger picture.

"I can kind of understand why Machiavellian Republicans would spew conspiracy theories.... What I don’t understand is why some Democrats are hopping on this bandwagon."

Writes David Brooks, in "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out." (NYT).

They may believe that the Epstein file release will somehow hurt Trump. But they are undermining public trust and sowing public cynicism in ways that make the entire progressive project impossible. They are contributing to a public atmosphere in which right-wing populism naturally thrives. 

I have been especially startled to see Ro Khanna, a House Democrat and one of the most impressive politicians in America, use the phrase “the Epstein class” in his public statements.

"His beefy tattooed arms and weathered face made him look like a live-action Popeye. He’s often styled in a dirty ball cap and ragged T-shirt...."

"... implying a sort of everyman machismo. It’s the kind of look that suggests (U.S. Senate candidate Graham) Platner could be the Democratic Party’s new great white hope — a working-class white man who can speak to class antagonism in an economically unequal electorate. There’s just one teensy-weensy problem. It turns out that friend-of-the-white-working-class had a Nazi tattoo. The tattoo resembles a Totenkopf, a well-known symbol of official Nazis, the Nazi-adjacent and people who just think that Nazi iconography is tough. The gist is that Platner got the tattoo in 2007 in Croatia when he was on leave with his fellow Marines. Platner has said that he didn’t know the symbol’s semiotics. He only knew that Marines get 'terrifying-looking' tattoos...."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness" (NYT). I've made that a gift link so you can try to figure out what this "greatest weakness" is supposed to be. 

"If Democrats don’t reverse course, they may soon find themselves unable to win presidential elections."

"Increasingly, the party is made up of urban professionals who graduated from four-year universities and command relatively high salaries. Having more of these supporters has been a boon to the party’s finances, but electorally, the shift has been a disaster. The electoral power of high-income voters is limited: Not only are they a smaller demographic, but they are also concentrated in a handful of coastal states that do not decide presidential elections. By contrast, the lower-income voters lost by Democrats are dispersed across the battleground states that increasingly determine the Electoral College outcome. Under this system, no candidate can win the presidency today without galvanizing the working class...."

Writes Brody Mullins, in "How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do" (NYT)(free-access link, because there are some good graphs that show how the class politics flipped).

I hope you enjoy it!

OMG 😂 pic.twitter.com/CDq60JMizH https://t.co/YPyEuLn7Sx

— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 21, 2025

"I'm not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as..."

"... me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days. Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn't want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them. However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right — nay, obligation — to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created."

Writes JK Rowling, on X, responding to a video you can see at the link.

Rowling has kept a silence as long as her antagonists were children, but now she's decided to speak — to write — and no one can out-write her. She continues:

"[P]robably the most alarming single state in the country for Democrats is looking at the Republican gains all along the border in south Texas."

"And the county that jumps out to me, there is Starr County. Starr County is the county that has moved the most in the entire country from 2012 to 2024. Hmm. This is a county that Barack Obama won overwhelmingly in 2012, and that Donald Trump won comfortably in 2024..... It's moved continuously in the Republican direction, and the sum of that movement is 89 percentage points. And what's interesting is Starr County isn't just this county that has moved the most, it also is the most predominantly Latino county in America. And it's not just shifting away from the Democratic party, it's stampeding away from the Democratic party. And while Starr County is this one small county in the Texas border, what you see is that same type of movement in counties with broad Latino populations, whether you're talking about the Bronx in New York City, Queens, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, places with diverse populations have moved steadily to the right, even in a lot of them, where Democrats are still winning, they're winning by less and by a lot less. I mean, to use like a fancy political science term, we're talking about racial depolarization.... For, for a long time, one of the most important markers of how a person was going to vote in America was what race are you?"

From today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast. Audio and transcript here (at Podscribe).

The guest is Shane Goldmacher, who wrote the NYT article "Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward" that we were talking about on May 27th, here.

"White, college-educated voters shifted to the right, and by significantly more than White, noncollege voters did."

So it says here in "The 2024 election was even weirder than we thought/An expansive new report challenges early theories about how Donald Trump won" (WaPo).

That's a free-access link, so you can read the details and form an opinion over whether to trust this rather than all that other polling and poll analysis that found a "continued leftward march of White, college-educated voters," supposedly "the only major racial subgroup shifting left," which "reinforced existing fears among Democrats that they were increasingly appealing to educated White voters with their policies and message at the exclusion of other groups."

Other headings at that link: "The gender gap was real," "Democrats held up better with rural voters than with urban voters," and "Democrats gained ground with engaged voters."

I don't trust any of this material. The Democratic Party has a big problem and must rebuild itself, but how? By increasing its appeal to white, college-educated voters, because that's actually where the problem is? 

"The rich are punishing Trump for siding with the neglected, humiliated working class.... People cannot believe that there is a President working for them... and telling Wall Street to go screw itself."

No matter what the screeching drama club says - Trump will be remembered well for trying to save the working class at a time when everyone is about to be replaced by robots. https://t.co/yJmmZU6UHc

— Sasha Stone (@realsashastone) April 3, 2025

The Democrats have elected their party chair.

Introducing the new Chair of the DNC: @KenMartin73. pic.twitter.com/PIC6zBO6u7

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) February 1, 2025

See my discussion of the race for the chair, earlier today, here.

ADDED: Here's the NYT article on the subject, "Democrats Elect Ken Martin, a Party Insider, to Lead the D.N.C./The Democratic National Committee chose Mr. Martin, the leader of the Minnesota Democrats, to help oversee a demoralized national party split over its future and its response to President Trump."