Hunter Biden’s doing great on Twitter—lotta humility, lotta gags, the occasional swatback against some MAGA dope. I have to figure he’s trying out for a career as an influencer. His whole life he should’ve done something like this, but instead he posed as a man who gets things done. In his case, thank God, the pulling of strings. All he had to do was make people think dad listened to him. So he blarneyed away, him with his smile and his suit. Now his tie-and-suitcase days have turned to crap, so he’s switched to a career where blarney is all. I bet he’s starting a podcast, recovery talk with a side of Resistance, and no responsibility beyond running his mouth and counting the money. His dad had gifts and energy and landed at the top of Washington. Now Hunter’s gifts and energy have finally found the right channel. He knows what he’s good for, and it’s talking about his wrecked life and what people with wrecked lives can do.
Graham Platner, on the other hand, appears to be stuck in his failed-experiments phase. A few years ago, he was posting about how happy he was being an oyster farmer. Now he wants to be a senator. He’s exciting, but like Pigpen (to borrow a joke from Joe Klein) there’s a cloud of shit wherever he goes. Put differently the candidate’s blazing personality has created an endless string of fires that his campaign struggles to put out. Did the candidate manhandle his then-girlfriend a decade and a half ago? Did he, just two and a half years ago, spend the first months of his marriage sending texts about fucking to various women who were not his wife? Did his former girlfriend (the manhandling accuser) figure out after they broke up that the tattoo on his chest was a Totenkopf? Or had he told her, meaning that he lied when he told us he didn’t know what it was? Perhaps related to all the above, is the restaurant run by Platner’s mom really the main customer for his oyster farm?
Fetterman and Platner and Bobby Jr. and above all, Trump. These rampaging oddballs of unfettered maleness, these raucous bull mavericks who never seem to accomplish anything. Dumbass packs of voters keep thinking that they’re fighting the system and all they do is pick a man who doesn’t function. To quote Thomas Massie, a disappointed ideologue, on the Republican base: “they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race.” This is especially the Republicans, but Fetterman and Platner show it isn’t just the Republicans. Thank God for AOC and Zohran Mamdani. They’re respectable people and don’t have their lives flapping about.
Now the ex-girlfriend, who’s spent a decade or so as a conservative apparatchik, is saying The New York Times chose to kneecap the story in which it reported her allegations. Boy, this is a lot of murkiness. Maine has to elect a senator, and on the way tiresome, baffling questions keep falling from the sky. Did he…? Does she…? Did the Times…? I see a parallel with our Iran policy. Not so much that it provokes questions, more that it is, in itself, a rain of wearisome crud inflicted on us by dumbass voters determined to rock out. Graham, be like Hunter—get away from power. Voters, chaos is always more boring than exciting.