No wonder it took Vermont socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders so long to finally urge Graham Platner to quit his senate bid.
Sanders has his own rape-related skeleton, which surfaced when he was running in 2016 for president.
During Sanders’ first run for the presidency an article he once wrote on his “rape fantasy” came to light, throwing his campaign into a virtual talespin.
So it’s not surprising that Bernie was so tepid in his advice Tuesday to Platner, who a former girlfriend accused of rape Monday in a Politico article.
Vermont’s senior U.S. senator was effectively the last man standing defending Platner, the Democrat party’s first choice to take on GOP U.S. Sen. Susan Collins.
While party luminaries couldn’t issue their press releases quickly enough following the Politico piece, Sanders was nowhere to be found.
Given his own awkward history with public sexual fantasies, Sanders had to lay low, lest his hypocrisy get the better of his big mouth.
Finally, late Tuesday, Sanders ratcheted up his courage, issuing a curt single-paragraph post on X saying that he “recommended” to Platner “that he step aside.”
While other Democrats were going full bore with their righteous indignation over Platner’s women problem, Bernie stayed silent.
Imagine Bernie silent on anything.
Under political pressure to say something, anything, Sanders broke his silence on the accused rapist running for the U.S. Senate seat from Maine.
Sanders was among Platner’s earliest supporters, endorsing the Democrat nominee long before other party luminaries reluctantly decided they could live with him.
But once a major Washington news outlet ran a piece Monday quoting one of Platner’s girlfriends alleging he once raped her, party leaders who had finally backed Platner over two-term limited Gov. Janet Mills began falling like flies.
Sanders was a holdout, refusing to join the Platner critics until political pressure apparently gave him no choice.
“I have spoken with Graham Platner about the best path forward for Maine,” Sanders finally said Tuesday. “In light of these very serious allegations, I have recommended that he step aside.”
“Recommended he step aside” was what came to constitute political fortitude for Bernie Sanders.
Given an essay Sanders wrote in 1972, it would be hard for Bernie to be giving his BFF Graham Platner any lectures on respecting women.
Titled “Man-and-Woman” the essay, published in a radical leftist Vermont newspaper, included graphic sentences about female rape fantasies.
“A woman enjoys intercourse with her man – as she fantasizes about being raped by three men simultaneously,” it read.
Sanders’ campaign in 2015 claimed the essay was “a dumb attempt at dark satire that in no way reflects his views on women.”
The piece was published in the “alternative newspaper” Vermont Freeman, according to the news outlet Mother Jones, which featured an image of the essay in a profile eleven years ago about Sanders.
ABC News at the time quoted a Sanders spokesman claiming the essay was “intended to attack gender stereotypes back in the 1970s, though it is as stupid today as it was back then.”
A second article from Mother Jones during that campaign included a 1963 opinion piece Sanders wrote in the campus newspaper at the University of Chicago advocating for “sexual liberalization.”
“The administrators of this university have the right to believe that unmarried students should not engage in sexual intercourse,” he wrote. “However, it is inconceivable and intolerable that these men should have the right to forcibly impose their moral, social and sexual beliefs on the students.”
No wonder Bernie has been so quiet on the guy he’s been actively touting as the next U.S. senator from Maine.
