cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38323356

https://archive.ph/wip/7kgpn

Oct. 31, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET Michelle Goldberg

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”

These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”

Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council.

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    2 days ago

    Alright, so again, I didn’t just randomly google these topics. I was in Iraq at the same time. I was a marine.

    Yes. We understand you have experience in committing war crimes. We aren’t asking if lil skorzeny did a good job of it.

    Further still, it is the literal smallest indirect fire weapon option to exist in the arsenal, so you could not be more judicious to respond to incoming fire than the use of a 40mm grenade.

    It’s almost like using indirect fire in an environment full of civillians is a no no?

    So if every single incident of returning indirect fire is a war crime, then there are a hell of a lot more war criminals in the military that need prosecution.

    Not the topic but…

    To be very clear, we never should have been there fighting in cities in unjust war or inversion, but it is incredibly clever ingenuity that chose the minimal explicit yield possible, with lots of effort specifically to avoid collateral damage when used. The pre-sighting described and calculating trajectories is not the work you spend weeks on if you intend to harm the wrong person.

    Yeah. I personally wouldn’t use the word “clever” to explain “figuring out how to randomly throw grenades at civillians without getting caught after being specifically told not to do that”

    You can believe no indirect fire weapons should ever be used in cities, and that is a fine enough opinion.

    I believe that he believed his commanding officers said that was the case because the risk to civillians was too great. He stated he didn’t care because he apparently knew better than everyone else because his gunnery sergeant took a seminar.

    But hey, thanks for confirming that your “expertise” really is in the whole “getting away with committing warcrimes” area. Which, to be clear, nobody is denying that platner has admitted to doing. What we are more concerned with is the “committing warcrimes” part of that and why he (and apparently you) feel the need to tell everyone you did that.