I hope everyone understands that, in an alternate timeline, it would have been much harder to hold Ramaswamy accountable for his pro-child-rape ad if Graham Platner were the Democratic candidate for Maine. "Your candidate is exploiting child abuse." "Yeah, well your candidate rapes and beats women." During the entire Platner saga, those of us who opposed Platner got told over and over again, "Well Republicans get away with everything, so why can't we?" We got told this over the Totenkopf. The reddit comments. And the initial story of domestic violence. This is a bad ethical argument; it's also a bad political one. I think the re-election of Donald Trump introduced a lot of nihilism among us, as well as a loss of any sense of order in the world. "Nothing has consequences, people like evil, and so we can all just race to the bottom." The race to the bottom was never a good fit for Democrats, as we claim to want to improve human welfare. To be anti-bigotry. To endorse compassion in governance. Also, again, it's just bad politics. If you want to hold the other side accountable, you have to clean your own house first. This applies to antisemitism as well, btw. Failure to properly address it on our side is a moral failure. It's also a political one, as it leaves us much weaker as a party on multiple fronts. Anyway, overall, we'd be in a much weaker position right now if the GOP had gotten their chance to dump their Platner Surprise--domestic violence and rape--on the entire Democratic party. Please remember this lesson in the future.