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[DFW]

26. Trying to destroy his life, right, gotcha

Trying to end Susan Collins's political career, maybe, but not destroying his life. He wasn't prepared for all the noise over his SS tattoo, OK, that's legitimate point, but he could have handled it a LOT better. He should have known who the Waffen SS was before getting it inked on him. Like any large military machine, the German military in WWII had a lot of different divisions. The Wolfpack (attack submarines) wasn't the same as Göring's Luftwaffe, and the three arms of the SS weren't the same as the general Wehrmacht.

My father in law was drafted off his farm into the Wehrmacht in 1941 at age 17. He was sent to Stalingrad in the middle of the winter of 1942, lost a leg to a Soviet artillery shell at age 18, and returned a cripple at age 19. Not exactly SS material (he hated them before getting grabbed off the farm, he hated them a lot more after returning). That tattoo is not a symbol of the National Socialists (Nazis for short). It is a symbol of the most cruel and brutal divisions of their military. The National Socialists weren't a military, they were a political party. Platner's tattoo wasn't a "Nazi" tattoo any more than a tattoo with the emblem of some division of Stalin's Red Army was a "communist" tattoo. In the case of the Waffen SS, it was an emblem of something far more sinister than just the ruling party. If he never understood the difference, maybe he should have taken a course in 20th century military history and had it removed prior to running for the US Senate.

There are no free tickets--not with us anyway. Just because the Republicans nominate and elect a pig farmer from Iowa or an ignorant football coach from Alabama, that doesn't means that an oyster farmer from Maine gets an automatic pass from us. I don't expect every Democratic nominee for the Senate to have Jon Ossoff's intellect, but the Senate is a national stage. It's not enough to prove you're a good guy. You also need to prove that you can stand up to the bad guys, and that is where Platner is coming up short.