Last week, a Maine man called the police, asking them to shut up his goat. I have further investigated the story. It turns out the caller was the campaign manager for Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, and the caller was seeking the police’s help to get his client to shut up and stop advertising to the world that he is a imbecile.
Barack Obama adviser turned podcast bro, Ben Rhodes, profiled Platner in the New York Times. You might know Platner from his wisdom that women who were victims of sexual assault “should take responsibility” for what happened to them. Or from calling himself a communist. Or calling cops “bastards.” Or asking online why Black people don’t tip. Or calling White people racist and stupid. Or praising Hamas. Or having a totenkopf tattoo, which Nazi concentration camp officers had during the Holocaust.
In his profile, Ben Rhodes is putting lipstick on the Nazi pig. All Rhodes says about these abhorrent facts is:
As a young Marine, he got a skull and bones tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol. (He denied knowing its meaning.) His history on Reddit includes offensive comments that he attributes to a long process of dealing with the trauma of war.
If I were to debunk every stupid thing about Rhodes’s profile, I would have to publish a book. So I will just go through the bigger items.
First, let’s not fall for this slander on veterans. The vast, vast majority of veterans do not have Nazi tattoos, do not blame rape victims for getting assaulted, and do not side with terrorists. Anyone who believes that has not been around veterans, who are some of America’s most decent people. Some, and by no means all, have trauma from the war, but that trauma does not manifest as Nazism and misogyny. Rhodes dishonors the military and veterans by blaming these on fighting in combat, as opposed to blaming it on Platner. It is also worth mentioning that an acquaintance of Platner confirmed that Platner actually knew that his tattoo was a Nazi tattoo.
Rhodes writes, “Yes, we have prevented another catastrophic attack in the 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001. To do that, we spent more than $6 trillion fighting wars that killed over 7,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians, inflicting trauma on countless people.” I, on the other hand, think that it is good that America was not attacked again. It gets better.
Rhodes says of Platner, “Visceral outrage over that reality infuses Mr. Platner’s opposition to the war in Iran. Sure, at campaign stops, he talks about high gas prices and the Trump administration’s incompetence. But the core of his message is an unflinching disgust for the forever war we have waged since 9/11.” Which will sound nice to the editors of the New York Times. But to the average American, this is an admission that Rhodes and Platner do not care about their pocketbooks as much as they do about dishonoring America and attacking the military.
Rhodes quotes Platner, “Nobody is going to be able to convince me that what I did in Iraq and Afghanistan did anything for the people of Sullivan, Maine.” But this sounds like a campaign soundbite that Rhodes was just dismissing. As for the people of Maine, how about the fact that their country was not attacked by another mass terrorist attack?
Rhodes then attacks Republicans for not criticizing Donald Trump on the Iran War, but he gives an honorable mention to Tucker Carlson who has been. Maybe the fact that the only guy who does it is a known racist, pro-Putin, likely paid by Qatar, and a Jew-hater is a tell that the war is a good idea?
To be fair to Platner, some of his criticisms are fair. He served in Afghanistan in 2011 and then quit the military. He recalls being in Afghanistan as a contractor in 2018, thinking that we had not advanced the ball there at all. Maybe if we had a better commander-in-chief than Barack Obama for most of that period? Ben Rhodes could not be reached for comment!
Rhodes and Platner have a new vision for foreign policy. First, we should slash the defense budget and buttress NATO. How do you weaken NATO’s leading military while strengthening NATO? With a magic wand, I guess.
Once you solved that problem, you work with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, “focusing on the existential risks of nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and climate change.” Xi and Putin might be conducting genocides, but they sure are more reasonable than Speaker Mike Johnson on climate change, right?
Here’s my favorite part:
More than any of this, though, Americans must change their relationship to war itself. One reason we have a hard time reckoning with the forever war is that it undermines our own story. We like to think of America as a force for good, acting out of enlightened self-interest, our military fighting for freedom around the globe. Is that really what’s been happening?
The 1920s called, and they want their foreign policy back. This is exactly what America did during the Warren Harding administration. The result? World War II happened the next decade. Which is why we decided to have a different relationship with war, a more comfortable one. Because fighting small wars is better than fighting a world war.
Platner made the moral case too: “You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.” He is absolutely right on this. And guess what: Every president who has decided to take military action, every secretary of defense who executes it, and every member of Congress who votes for it considers these. What Platner says is obviously true, but it is stupid of him and Rhodes to presume that American policymakers don’t consider these. Okay, Rhodes worked for Obama and knows Obama well. Maybe we should defer to his judgment that Obama was a psychopath. But I’m sure that the rest have always done these.
This is how Rhodes ends the piece:
Put another way, the forever war has been destroying America from within, like an organism that must keep growing to survive, filling us with fear of outsiders and contempt for one another. War does that to societies: Once you normalize taking human life abroad, you tend not to value it at home.
Except that the studies that make this case are based on societies that have been at war, and the American people have not experienced a home front war since the Civil War. But this stupid point doesn’t prevent him form making a pretentious conclusion:
That is why we must listen to voices like Mr. Platner’s. The kind of visceral and moral reckoning he advocates is the only way to truly dismantle the forever war, change our priorities and detoxify our country. To save ourselves, we must stop this cycle of violence. We must find meaning not in our capacity to kill or control others, but in one another.
In short, Rhodes and probably Platner think that Americans are a bunch of sadists who enjoy watching innocent people bombed abroad and gunned down on American streets. Well, at least I understand him now. If I thought the same way of my fellow Americans, I would hate them and our country too.
Except that this is all nonsense. Rhodes and Platner hate their compatriots because they barely know them. But then, the question becomes: Platner is a rape apologist, pro-Hamas, Nazi who somehow thinks that the people of Maine are the sadist; are Mainers gullible enough to elect him?