What was Graham Platner inking?

Has anyone seen Graham Platner’s tramp stamp?

“I grew up as a little punk rock kid listening to Dead Kennedys and Dropkick Murphys,” Graham Platner, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for the open Maine Senate seat said yesterday at a town hall in Ogunquit. He neglected to include the information that as a little punk rock kid he attended Hotchkiss, a private boarding school in Connecticut that currently costs more than $70,000 a year for tuition and meals, whose alumni include the founders of Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. Such details rarely appeal to the common people.

Platner, who runs an unprofitable oyster farm, served eight years in the Marines after high school. Before he served, he was protesting the Iraq War, saying “I might have read too much Hemingway” – even though Hemingway never saw a lick of combat. He also worked for Blackwater and liked to post on Reddit, including this from 2018: “Fight until you get tired of fighting with words and then fight with signs, and fists, and guns if need be.” Even worse, he worked as a volunteer bartender at Capitol Hill’s Tune Inn in 2013.

That could just be the PTSD talking, but Platner is having trouble explaining away his tattoo that greatly resembled the Totenkopf, a skull-and-bones insignia worn by Hitler’s SS. The fact that Platner revealed his Totenkopf while guesting an episode of Pod Save America (equally offensive, frankly) means he realized it was going to be a political problem. He and some fellow Marines got their Totenköpfe while on leave in Bosnia.

Cockburn has some questions for Platner. What’s the appropriate length of time between finding out your drunk Balkan tattoo is a Totenkopf and getting it removed or covered? How does that relate to your unwillingness to take money from AIPAC “or any group that supports the genocide in Gaza?” Also: wat other tattoos are you hiding? The voters of Maine deserve to see it all. Brigitte Macron’s not too big for it, nor should you be Graham!

Skeptic that he is, Cockburn doesn’t know what to be more suspicious of: Platner’s somewhat shady backstory, or the fact that all of these negative stories about him emerged just after Chuck Schumer’s favored option, 77-year-old governor and purported former snow bunny Janet Mills, jumped into the race. It’s astroturf-on-astroturf violence.

Yet Platner, another in a line of weird but interesting left-wing candidates of late, appears destined to win the nomination, Totenkopf or not. He’s running a modern version of a whistle-stop campaign, appealing to voters by talking about Gaza from the open rear bed of a pickup truck. Here’s what one voter had to say about him: “I’m not dissuaded by a bad tattoo, or some bad comments. I’ve lived long enough to know people make mistakes, and I’ve never been someone to throw a person by the wayside because they misstep.”

As the Dropkick Murphys once sang to that little punk-rock kid at Hotchkiss: you’ll never walk alone.

On our radar

MALAY AWAY President Trump departs on a week-long trip to Asia tonight, which will take him through Malaysia and South Korea.

HIT THE ROAD, JACK Former special counsel Jack Smith is asking to testify in open hearings after being summoned by the House Judiciary Committee.

BLOWING UP Inflation edged up to 3 percent in September, according to a delayed report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Going Caracas

The President of Peace sure seems ready to declare war in South America after he ordered another strike against an alleged Venezuelan drug boat this week. If you’re in Venezuela, Cockburn advises, don’t go near the ocean. But Donald Trump appears to be lighting lantern number one as well. “The land is going to be next,” Trump said yesterday. “I think that we are going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We are going to kill them, you know? They are going to be, like, dead.”

They’re either going to be dead or not, Mr. President, there is no “like.” Trump appears to have no patience for the fentanyl, and he’s sick of Nicolás Maduro’s posturing. He’s declared the Trump Doctrine. Given that the distance between Caracas and Miami is approximately the same as the distance between New York and Miami, this makes some sense. We all share the same hemisphere – and you’re either with Trump or you’re, like, against him.

Close Encounter

The dry cleaners of DC have dollar signs in their eyes: gala season is once again upon us. Kicking things off was last night’s Encounter Books Gala at the Mellon Auditorium, where guests supped Laurent Perrier, scoffed beef Wellington and a beet salad, and left with tote bags stuffed with dangerous literature. Cockburn’s Speccie comrade Roger Kimball was the gracious host, while the night’s honorees were Penn professor Amy Wax and Claremont Review of Books editor Charles Kesler, who were introduced by Ilya Shapiro and Senator Tom Cotton respectively. There was an unusual amount of thirsting after Senator Cotton from female attendees within earshot of Cockburn during his remarks, proof of how low the bar for men is in this wretched city.

Spotted: Larry Arnn, Scott Atlas, Christopher Caldwell, Kelly Chapman, Kara and Nick Clairmont, John Eastman, Mollie Hemingway, Antonia Hitchens, Raheem Kassam, Joshua Katz and Solveig Gold, Heather Mac Donald, Daniel McCarthy, Charles Murray, Chloe Ross, Christopher Scalia, Eugene Scalia, Robby Soave, Sarah Beth Spraggins, Jade Warwick and about half of The Spectator’s US masthead.

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