Screw Up, Move Up

Why we always seem to wind up with the worst political candidates…and, why I think Platner is likely to win election unless Susan Collins can come up with a scandal of her own.

I don’t remember when I first heard the saying, “Screw up, move up”, but I know it was on the southern border. One of the Border Patrol Agents would screw up by doing something like getting into one too many vehicle accidents, shooting at a skunk in the dark, getting drunk at the local strip club and running after one of the strippers into the changing room while demanding she go home with him if she didn’t prove she was in the country legally. You know, that sort of thing, good family fun. This would get the Agent put on the rubber gun squad, meaning he had his firearm taken from him and he had to sit in the office processing while his particular case was decided on by higher ups. Would he get fired? Would he get days on the beach (meaning a few days of unpaid vacation)? Or, would he skate and get promoted?

I can remember one of our Agents getting put on the rubber gun squad and someone else saying, “Watch, he’s gonna be our next supervisor”. I forget what the offense was, but I remember thinking, “What? After screwing up as badly as he did?” Sure enough, eventually he was given days on the beach, and six months later, suddenly, he was the new supervisor.

(One of the Agents literally shot himself in the foot and became a supervisor…with a .223 no less).

How does this happen? Why does this happen? The common wisdom of the station was that if you screwed up, you were placed in the office with the supervisors. You wound up doing a lot of the processing of illegal aliens, and you got to know the supervisors a lot better. After the outrage of the initial offense died down, the supervisors start to decide they really like the guy. “Besides, now, he knows all the paper work we have to deal with.”

The guys out in the field catching illegal aliens had a bit of a hostile relationship with the supervisors. I heard about this while studying criminal justice. In a police department, a police officer out in the field is in many ways his own boss. Especially in the days before body cams and smart phones, there was a lot of “officer discretion”. The cop on the beat could decide to give a warning and not a ticket for speeding. He could decide not to make a domestic violence arrest (“If I were married to her, I’d’ve done the same”). The supervisor is often in the office wondering what in the world kind of trouble that rookie officer out on the street is about to come up with.

There’s a saying said only partly in gest, “Big cases, big problems. Little cases, little problems. No cases, no problems.” Some of the Agents who made the most arrests were known colloquially as “Shit magnets”. They might bring you the most arrests and the most narcotics, but they also brought along reports of vehicle rammings, aliens claiming to have been roughed up, arresting LAPRs (pronounced “lappers” and standing for Lawfully Approved for Permanent Residency), and a myriad of other problems (like shooting at a skunk in the middle of the night when you were supposed to be “laying in” hoping to catch a drug load an informant had given information on).

How does this apply to politics? Let’s take our friend Graham Platner as an example. There were eight candidates vying for the Democratic senate nomination: Janet Mills (former governor of Maine), Graham Platner, David Costello, Jordan Wood, Dan Keblan, Daira Smith-Rodriguez, David Evans, and Tucker Favreau. Now, I believe that the moron vote is the most important vote in any American election. One of the most important parts to being elected is simply name recognition. You cannot rely on the average moron to bother to read up on the candidates, why that would take work! No, it’s easier to sit back and let the T.V. or social media tell you who the candidates are.

So, you have one candidate with actual name recognition, Janet Mills, because she used to be governor. The average Mainer (i.e, moron, same as all the other states) doesn’t know a thing about the other candidates.

(As an aside, I remember reading a social media post where someone commented that before Trump came along, he had never heard a candidate deliver an immigration enforcement message. I responded something along the lines of, “What? Have you never heard of Tom Tancredo?” Apparently, he had not. I should have also asked him if he had ever heard of Pat Buchanan, or, listened to what Bill Clinton said on the campaign trail.)

Now, how is the moron going to find out about the other candidates? According to Grok, in mid-October 2025 CNN, Politico and the Bangor Daily News all report Graham Platner’s reddit posts come to light. “One was asking why black people don’t tip, and another suggested sexual assault victims should take responsibility.” Now, the moron voter may hear through the ether about that, but he is not focused on it. Then, it comes out that Platner has a Nazi Totenkopf skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest. Now, that story explodes so big that even I hear of it and I’m not in the state of Maine. It’s national news. BING, BING, BING! Massive name recognition is achieved. It’s reported everywhere. Graham Platner seeks to explain it away by saying he got it when he was in the Marine Corps on leave from duty in Iraq with fellow Marines in Croatia. Platner (a German surname BTW) claims he didn’t know it was a Nazi SS Totenkopfverbande tattoo, and that they were drunk and just looking to get a cool tatt. It later came out that an ex-girlfriend of his said he referred to it as “my Totenkopf.”

Platner criticized a U.S. army soldier and said he (the army private) was so dumb as to not deserve to live:

Platner works as an “oyster farmer”, but he only seems to sell oysters to his mother’s restaurant.

He talked of masturbating in port-a-potties. “I still have to jerk off every time I sit in a portash*tter… that blue water smell conditioned me.”

Apparently, he bragged about raping male burglars:

You think that this guy makes Homer Simpson look like a nuclear engineer. What more screw ups can he possibly do?

I was going through channels on Serius XM radio and heard someone on the POTUS channel seeking to explain this phenomena. He was saying that the more times a person hears of a candidate on their side of the aisle being attacked, the more the instinct to circle the wagons and defend him becomes. I guess that explains why Virginia Senate candidate Jay Jones won despite Jones saying he would murder Republican speaker Todd Gilbert and his children.

So, Platner’s opponent Daira Smith-Rodriguez wound up dropping out. Did you ever even hear about her? She served 15 years as a civilian contracting officer for the U.S. Air Force and claims to have saved the taxpayer billions of dollars. She had to drop out, but endorsed Janet Mills instead. Smith-Rodriguez claims to have been a survivor of sexual assault in the Air Force and couldn’t endorse Platner because he minimized the problem.

David Costello. David Costello. EVER HEARD OF HIM? No, of course you haven’t. He was the other legitimate candidate running to be the Democratic senator from Maine besides Mills and Platner. Did Costello ever have a Kik account? (Kik is apparently some website for kids that child predators are known to go on). Did Costello have a Nazi tattoo?

Costello was scandal free. He should have made up a scandal or two to get noticed. When researching him, I used Grok, and Grok essentially only gave me his campaign website to identify who he was, no independent articles written up about him at all. His own campaign’s website for reference:

I’m sure I would disagree with him politically on many things too, but his great weakness is that he was normal, scandal free. I feel for Costello’s campaign manager. He was probably sitting there pleading for Costello to have done something bad, “Please sir, we’re going to lose. Didn’t you cheat on your wife at least once?! Didn’t you watch kiddie porn once even if it was by accident?”

I predict Platner will win the Maine senate seat. The only way it can be prevented is if the rumor I heard that Susan Collins was caught on a hot mike saying she likes to go up to male staffers and, “Grab ‘em by the balls. And you know, when you’re a Senator, they let you do it.”