When bad people do bad things in politics

Look: bad people do bad things.

True in politics, true in real life.

In politics, being bad or doing bad things isn’t always fatal. Bad people sometimes win. Donald Trump, Richard Nixon et al. It happens.

But people who are good - or who claim to be good - shrugging about a bad person doing bad things in politics? That shouldn’t happen.

Justin Trudeau, for example. He wore racist blackface and was alleged by a woman to have groped her. He hid both until they leaked out.

For me, those were disqualifying events. Forget about becoming Prime Minister - Trudeau should have never, ever been green-lit as a Liberal candidate. If his surname had been different, he wouldn’t have been.

But his party’s caucus, and his party’s members, defended him. They shrugged. They looked the other way. They traded principles for power.

Me, a life-long Liberal, couldn’t. I’d spent decades fighting racism and sexism and their variants and I couldn’t just shrug. So I left.

And, in the end, I found Trudeau’s followers more nauseating than Trudeau himself. He was just being who he was: an entitled, spoiled son of a millionaire Prime Minister.

But his Liberal followers? The ones who shrugged? They were worst kind of hypocrites. Because they’d exonerated Trudeau for they sort of things for which they’d excoriated Conservatives.

Which brings us to the Democrats.

Full disclosure, as they say: like the Canadian Liberals, I’ve worked for the American Democrats. I thought I knew them - the Maine Dems in particular. I’d volunteered for them the most.

I don’t recall ever meeting Graham Platner. Maybe I did. Last Fall, I heard he was seeking the nomination as one of his party’s two representatives in the U.S. Senate. The party’s brightest lights swooned over him: plain-talking oyster farmer, former Marine, progressive talker who accused Israel of genocide.

Then, in October, some deleted Reddit posts came to light.

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