Even with the news that Democrat Senate candidate Graham Platner apparently has a history of sending freaky messages to women who weren’t his wife and using an app associated with the sexual exploitation of minors, what I think about with regard to Platner is something he said last year in October. And it revealed everything we needed to know about his moldy character well before the “sexting” scandal.
Recall during that time Platner was defending himself in another controversy related to a Nazi-themed tattoo he was sporting on his chest and which he has since had covered up with more unsightly ink. By way of explaining how he got the original marking, he for some reason thought it was necessary to also publicize a family video from his brother’s wedding in 2015, wherein a chunky Platner is seen at the reception dancing almost naked, seemingly drunk, and lip-syncing along to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball.”
Here’s how Platner described the video in a podcast interview at the time, emphasis added:
“The video is from my brother’s marriage to his wife, my sister-in-law, who I was serenading. I told them that my wedding gift to them would be my embarrassment, and so I performed a lip-sync version of Miley Cyrus’ ‘Wrecking Ball’ to my sister-in-law on the day of her wedding to my brother. And … now, of course, that embarrassment, which was mostly just held internally in the family, as we always watched that video at family events and laughed, is now shared with the world. So I feel like I’m just gonna give them a wedding gift for the rest of my life” (emphasis mine).
You read that correctly. As his wedding gift to his brother and sister in law, Platner, who was in his early 30s at the time, stripped down to a pair of skimpy running shorts to do an obnoxious Jack Black-style miming of a Miley Cyrus song — on the day of the wedding.
Imagine the level of narcissism it takes to not only tell your family that the gift you’re giving them on one of the most important days of their lives is not only yourself, but that it’s yourself drunkenly dancing nearly nude in front of all their friends and loved ones, a captive audience.
Should you decide to watch the video, you’ll notice that the woman who appears to be Platner’s sister in law doesn’t seem particularly amused by the performance. At one point, she’s not even paying attention and only when Platner gets right in her face, his puffed out gut sagging over his waistband, does she give a polite smile.
Nobody could blame her. It was her wedding day, and her brother-in-law decided that what she deserved was for him to seize the attention and make the moment about himself, not even in a tasteful way. She was probably furious, even if she never admitted it. (If she did, Platner seems like the type to take offense.)
It was an obscene, self-centered thing to do, and all the other little controversies surrounding Platner — the shocking tattoo, his history of crass online forum remarks, his textual affairs with other women — reinforce the probability that he’s simply an immature, gross person.
That’s not to say it disqualifies him from office. After all, Rosa DeLauro still sits in Congress. Maine voters can decide that. But he’s set to run against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a demonstrably centrist lawmaker who is at least by every indication a relatively decent person.
She’s certainly not the type to take off her clothes at a family member’s wedding and call it a gift. To trade Collins out for Platner just strikes me as a poor choice, given what we know about him.
