Look, there are plenty of reasons to despise Graham Platner. The track listing on the K-Tel album of loathsomeness that is his résumé includes pushing around girlfriends, working-class cosplay, bizarre opinions on rape and race, Marxist musings, phallic photos, a Totenkopf tattoo, and his notorious outhouse onanism. He’s the Phil Spector of gaffes, pumping out hit after hit, yet likely to end up in prison after they find a dead lady in the pad his dad bought for him. But we should stay away from his VA disability rating. And this leads to a bigger discussion about how we need to stay away from stuff that isn’t true about our enemies.
Let’s talk about his VA rating. It is 100%. That means he gets about $4,800 bucks a month from the feds. It’s undisputed that he served overseas several times, and we know this because he blames Susan Collins for his volunteering to do so. Let’s add that disingenuous crap to his CV. But don’t add disability fraud, at least not yet.
What civilians don’t know is that when you get 100% disability, you are not 100% disabled in the way normal people think of it – unable to function or perform all aspects of daily life. In the VA disability system, 100% disability means your various disabilities, each assigned a percentage, add up to 100% of the maximum monthly pension. It is not only possible that people with 100% disability can continue to work, including physical jobs, but it happens all the time, and it is not fraud. Most vets are go-getters who will work through their challenges. Moreover, you can’t see all of people’s disabilities. Take tinnitus, that ringing in the ear that so many of us have - hey, there it is now! It’s worth about 10%. And then back problems, which are ubiquitous, especially among paratroopers, could be another 30% or 40%. And so on and so on. Add them all up, and they can reach 100%; then the person is 100% VA-disabled.
Now, a lot of people on our side have been pointing out that he supposedly works on an oyster farm—you know, the one that only sells mollusks to his mom (put that on the list of his fake stuff). Then they ask how he can get 100% VA disability. Well, he can—maybe. I’m not giving him the benefit of the doubt; I’m saying, let’s not go all in on something we can be wrong about when there’s so much to be right about regarding how he’s wrong. You can’t see many real disabilities. I have two close friends whose lungs were severely damaged by burn pits—another of George Bush’s disastrous legacies (maybe someday he’ll do paintings of them when he’s not too busy paling around with his friends Barack and Bill). In any case, they both continue to work hard and do stuff, even though they get frequent infections and, in one case, can’t travel by air. Their problems are likely to get worse over time. They deserve their 100% disability rating, even though you and I can’t always see their damage.
So, my advice is: Don’t attack Graham Platner on the VA stuff, at least not yet. Putting aside that there are a plethora of other things to attack him about, when you start attacking a vet based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the VA system, you’re going to make even politically sympathetic vets and vet families think that you don’t care enough to understand the system, or that you’re being disingenuous yourself.
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Now, I don’t know if Graham Platner has faked his disabilities. People do that all the time in far too great numbers. It’s particularly frustrating to see obvious frauds overcompensated, but people with real problems not properly compensated. I should point out that my experience with the VA—I have a very low disability rating after 27 years of service—was positive. I was treated fairly, and my claim was resolved quickly. But a lot of legit vets have real problems with the system, and fakes take advantage of it. I don’t know what Graham Platner claimed in order to get 100%, and I haven’t seen his VA documents. The people of Maine are perfectly entitled to ask for them; let’s see if he’s willing to give them up. But as of now, we don’t know anything about his claims, so we don’t need to be talking about them.
Now, I am not defending Graham Platner. Nor will I defend him. If people inaccurately assess the nature of a VA claim to his detriment, that’s his problem. What I’m trying to do is keep us conservatives on the straight and narrow when we go after our opponents. Why am I doing that? Am I a weak squish with a spine of tofu who likes to sip cosmopolitans with feminine losers like Thom Tillis? Of course not. There are very good reasons for ensuring that when we say something, it’s true. The first thing is that God told us to. There’s a commandment out there that says you don’t bear false witness, so that’s off the table. We just don’t get to do it. If you think we ought to, you can take it up with Him—yes, Him, James Talarico.
And the second reason is practical. I was a trial lawyer for 30 years. If you want to lose all credibility, and probably your case, get up there in your opening statement and say something that is going to be proven false by the evidence during the trial. You’re done. Adios. Goodbye. In fact, the courts are well aware of this. As an old California standard jury instruction stated in part (the newer one is, as to be expected, a bit mushier), “A witness false in one part of his or her testimony is to be distrusted in others.” And that goes for us out in the political world, too. If we say something that’s factually false, people are not going to believe us about other things, and you can’t really blame them. We can’t waste our credibility on stuff that is just not so. And when you get a guy like Platner who sets out a smorgasbord of character flaws to choose from, it’s just dumb.
But, as I said, I’m not here to defend him. I defend people because I like them or for money, and I don’t like this guy, and he’s certainly not giving me any of his daddy’s money. If people want to make claims about his VA disability, he can go explain how the VA disability works—I’m doing it here for you behind the Townhall VIP paywall. And then he can answer the questions about his personal VA claim. Is it PTSD? Maybe he’s so emotionally damaged he shouldn’t be in a position of power, though I don’t need to see his VA claim to determine that—his bizarre fantasies about forcible sodomy tell me this guy is one I don’t want in the Senate, nor to make sudden moves around.
It’s important to attack our opponents. It’s important to critique them and to point out their deceptions and misconceptions. But to maintain our credibility, and therefore effectiveness, we need to stick to the facts. Lucky for us, the facts are damning enough.
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