On Tuesday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Last Word,” host Lawrence O’Donnell said that “I, for one, did not find any of Graham Platner’s answers to questions about a Nazi tattoo or previous sexist social media comments or accusations by women who had relationships with him — all of which he denied — to be credible at all.” But he didn’t cover that because things like “the ongoing worldwide humanitarian disaster created by Donald Trump destroying the United States Agency for International Development” are “more important” and he wasn’t sure if Platner would make it until November.
O’Donnell began by saying, “Because the United States military has been sent to war in Iran by Donald Trump and because Donald Trump is waging war on democracy in America every day and because Donald Trump is using the Trump Justice Department in a revenge campaign that we have never seen before, a revenge campaign of attempted false prosecutions, and because Donald Trump’s federal invasion forces have tried to take over American cities and shot and killed American citizens who did absolutely nothing to deserve even a single shot fired in their direction and because of the ongoing worldwide humanitarian disaster created by Donald Trump destroying the United States Agency for International Development, leaving babies, children of all ages, their parents and grandparents to starve to death, and because also through the destruction of USAID, Donald Trump has taken lifesaving medication away from people in a program that had already saved 25 million lives in Africa, a program created by a Republican president, this hour of television obviously does not have enough time to cover the details of every political campaign this season and this year. And so we’ve been very careful about what campaigns we have focused on here.”
He continued, “And the reason that this program never once covered the Graham Platner campaign for Senate in Maine is that those other stories are more important and that that candidate did not appear to me to be the kind of candidate who could make it all the way to November. And so I didn’t want to waste this audience’s attention on a candidate who might not even be there on Election Day. And, at the same time, the Platner campaign was getting a tremendous amount of coverage everywhere else, and so it didn’t really matter, in the least, whether we covered that campaign here or not, and no one noticed that we didn’t.”
O’Donnell further said, “I knew, with a candidacy like Graham Platner, that the vetting would come from the news media, and so it has. And every stage of that vetting, every stage of it has been disturbing. I, for one, did not find any of Graham Platner’s answers to questions about a Nazi tattoo or previous sexist social media comments or accusations by women who had relationships with him — all of which he denied — to be credible at all. I didn’t think any of his answers were credible. And I’m in no position to say who is telling the truth in stories now told about Graham Platner by people who knew him, women who were alone in a room with him. I don’t know what happened, but I know and I’ve always known, that I cannot believe him. And saying that I never believed Graham Platner is simply a statement about his own credibility as he addressed these controversies.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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