Doom Report (Week 77: Preaching and Practice)

A lot of the coverage this week has been about Graham Platner.  And I could point you at some of that coverage—oh, I could point you at so much coverage of that—but I’m not going to.  Because this week I’m reminded of something I used to say a lot: opinions are like assholes—everybody has one, they’re all different, and they all stink.  Now, I don’t say that so much any more, and I’ve never said it as part of these Doom Reports, because I’ve always sort of thought that my job here was to filter out those shitty opinions and actually point you at the ones that don’t stink.  But, on this topic, we truly have reached the nadir: none of the takes are any good.

Some people are saying that Platner’s vetting was not sufficient.  Well, no shit, Sherlock.  In other news, water is wet.  Some people are saying that maybe his accuser is a Republican plant, which feels like the epitome of wishful thinking.  Some people are saying that this is a good thing, because he wasn’t as popular as people were saying anyway, which feels like utter bullshit rationalization.  Some people (mostly the rightwing nutjobs) are saying that liberals will elect just any old scum ... isn’t that right, Mr. Grab-em-by-the-pussy-President?  (The aforementioned president, by the way, is not saying that: he’s expressing sympathy for Platner, due to his extensive experience being accused of sexual assault.)  Some people are saying that we should have never gotten behind a guy with a “Nazi tattoo.”  And this particular take is one of the absolute shittiest, because I’m almost positive that none of them have actually seen the tattoo in question and wouldn’t have been able to identify it as being Nazi-related if their lives had depended on it.  Some people are saying that it’s disgusting that people continue to support him while absolutely everyone who ever supported him has called for him to drop out and others have said that they never liked him from the beginning while pretending they weren’t pinning all hope of defeating Susan Collins on him for the past 6 months.  Look, the truth is ...

Actually, none of us really know the truth.  There’s a woman, and she says she really hates to do this because she really wanted to vote for him, but she has to let us know that Platner sexually assaulted her.  And she’s remarkably credible, and Platner’s denials are ... not that ... and at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter whether it’s true or not—well, it absolutely does matter to her, and to him, and to his wife and family, but it doesn’t matter from the perspective of the election.  He has to step down, because he’s not a Republican.  If he were a Republican, of course, he could keep right on running, and probably win.  But he’s not, so he must step down, and he probably should have done it with a bit more alacrity, and his procrastination is quite possibly the most damning evidence of his guilt.  He’s not acting like a guy who is hurt by a false accusation; he’s acting like a white guy that you likely didn’t want to be alone with in a bar even before he was caught doing something really horrible.  So he’ll exit the race, and we’ll get ... shit, I dunno, we’ll get someone else, and maybe they’ll be good, or maybe they won’t, and maybe we’ll end up losing the opportunity to replace one of the least useful Senatorial incumbents (and that’s saying something!), who was also possibly the most vulnerable.  Or maybe it’ll all work out anyway.  That doesn’t matter.

I think what matters is, this guy was a flawed human being, a person who, at the end of the day, we can’t possibly vote for, but that doesn’t change the fact he said some things which were pretty amazing. I talked about him a number of times in these reports—week 31, week 54, week 66, week 67, and week 69—and I even called him an “excellent candidate.”  I have no problem admitting I was wrong (there was, obviously, information that I was lacking).  But that doesn’t change the substance of what he was saying.  That substance is what the people of Maine were voting for, and I certainly hope that whoever replaces him will have the same substance.  What worries me is that people already seem to be trying to learn the wrong lesson from this.  You know how Hollywood works?  There’s a surprise hit, and all of a sudden every movie is a copycat of that one, until we’re all sick of the movies, and finally someone has the balls to make something different, and it becomes a huge new hit, and the lesson that the Hollywood execs learn is: start making rip-offs of the new movie.  Likewise, part of the vetting of Platner was this theory that here is a person who has made some mistakes, but that’s fine: he’s owned up to them, apologized for them, is comfortable talking about them.  That shouldn’t preclude him from ever being able to run for anything, because, if it did, only perfect people would be able to run for office, and those don’t exist.  And now everyone is rushing to learn the “lesson” that we shouldn’t try to run candidates that have problems.  I think this is a remarkably foolish lesson.  I think a better one would be, try harder to find the problems that all candidates, inevitably, have, and then see if any of them are things that are unforgiveable, like it is in Platner’s case.  But let’s don’t demand perfection: that’s a recipe for disappointment.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• The Daily Show had two great days this week, both featuring Ronny Chieng.  On Tuesday, he covers Trump’s 4th of July events, plus the interference in the World Cup game; on Wednesday, Ronny explains why we hate Spain now, and introduces us to the Islamic Republic of Japan.

• Gabe Sanchez is back with another great What Was That? segment on Trump’s reflecting pool woes.

• Nine months before the first Doom Report, I wrote a short post about the concept of ”vibecession”.  And, regularly throughout the series, I’ve revisited the topic whenever some experts seemed to agree with my theories: from week -9 to week 14 to week 26.  This week Some More News has the best explainer I’ve seen about why the economy feels so terrible even when the traditional numbers seem to be saying we’re all doing great.

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On the Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews special prosecutor Jack Smith (a.k.a. “the deranged Jack Smith”, as Trump is wont to call him), and former Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who had the job before being replaced by very normal person Kash Patel.  The most inspiring thing about these interviews is how utterly ordinary these people are.  They’re hardly deranged at all.  These are men who believe in the law, and aren’t interested in all the political shenanigans that are being foisted on them, and the stories they tell are in many ways heartbreaking: agents persecuted for things they cannot control, pushed into leaving jobs they love because they refuse to bend the rules, cowed into not prosecuting cases for fear of angering the higher powers.

So where is the note of hope?  It is, quite simply, that, despite all those things, those people still want to serve the American public.  The people that have left or been forced out are just biding their time, waiting for this weird political moment to be over so they can rejoin the government agencies that have spat on them, because that’s just how dedicated they are.  And, to cap it all off, Brian tells this story:

Brian: ... so I was riding to work.  Um, and I was going the speed limit: I promise.  It was 50 miles an hour.  Two-way ... street.  Hit a deer.  I had no time, nowhere to go.  And so, at 50 miles hour, I took a short flight and a longer slide and tumble.
Jon: Wow.
Brian: Bike is fine, importantly for me and my my mindset.  Um, but I’m fine, too.
Jon: All right.  Deer—deer is okay (important to me)?
Brian: I don’t—it, surprisingly, ran off: I never saw it again. ...  Um so, but what happened next after I realized that I was okay?  I stood up, and traffic stopped, on both sides of the street, and everybody emptied those cars—it was rush hour in the morning.  The first person to me was an African-American female in her 50s, let’s say.  Second person, young blonde woman in scrubs.  The third, fourth, fifth people were in the car that would have killed me if I went into oncoming traffic, filled with Hispanic laborers.  None of them asked who I voted for, ... my sexual orientation, my religion: they didn’t even ask my name.  All they saw was a dude in America who needed help and they helped me.  And that in that moment—and every moment in the last week and a half—has kind of like cleared the fog for me as far as all of the things I consume responsibly, and I think it is on those consumers—it’s on the communicators as well, in the organizations you talked about, and it’s on us—but it’s also on the consumers to be responsible and don’t just believe the first headline that you see, but read diversely, broadly, and don’t just get sucked in to what the algorithm is telling you how to think.
Jon: Brother: preach—preach.

Preach indeed.