Jul
9
2026

We Won't Have Graham Platner to Kick Around Anymore…

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

… at least not above the fold. Instead let's sing A Song of FIRE and ICE (archive.today link), inspired by Kevin D. Williamson.

Can we all agree that Todd Lyons is kind of a sissy?

The former acting director of ICE, the immigration enforcement agency that Donald Trump uses as his personal, occasionally homicidal goon squad, received an email nastygram from the author of Best Bike Rides Connecticut, David Streever, who is exactly the kind of imposing, Jason Statham-esque tough guy you’d figure the author of Best Bike Rides Connecticut is going to be. The email was pretty mild stuff—Shame on you, basically. Compared him to a Nazi, etc. Lyons, who has 22,000 armed agents at his disposal, was so freaked out that he sent ICE agents to Streeter’s [sic] house and then tracked him down while he was traveling with his 7-year-old daughter. The agents did their best Gestapo bit, informing the author of Best Bike Rides Connecticut that his critical email might have violated the law and trying to get him to sign some baloney paperwork.

There is no threat in this email. You can read it here. There was no plausible reason for the armed response of a federal law enforcement agency to criticism of its acting director, who is, evidently, kind of sensitive.

We’re not talking here about the lunatic ravings of some genuinely scary and dangerous figure, like maybe the author of Best Bike Rides New Jersey. This is the author of Best Bike Rides Connecticut.

If you'd like to show your support for Mr. Streever's Constitutionally-protected speech (and also Pun Salad, for that matter), an Amazon link to his book is over there on your right.

Also of note:

  • An inexplicably uncommon pun. I shoulda been all over this months ago: Jeffrey Blehar at the NR Corner: Democrats Suddenly Hobbled by a Bad Case of Platner Fasciitis. (archive.today link) Heh!

    But other than that, Google only coughs up the Nation from last October: Maine’s Case of Platner Fasciitis (archive.today link)

    Instead let's look at the always-correct Erick Erickson. Are we looking at the Dog That Didn't Bark, or The Fire Alarm They Refuse to Hear?

    For years, conservatives warned that something was wrong with Joe Biden. We were told we were cruel, ableist, cynical — that we were seeing decline where there was only a stutter, a lifelong tendency to misspeak, the ordinary friction of a long day. The people telling us this were not only Democratic politicians. They were the anchors, the fact-checkers, and the explainer-journalists whose entire professional identity rests on knowing better than the rubes. And when anyone of note confirmed what we had been saying, he had to be destroyed.

    Robert Hur was not a Fox News contributor. He was a special counsel appointed to examine Biden’s handling of classified documents. He declined to bring charges, and in explaining why, he wrote the sentence that detonated Washington: a jury, he judged, would see “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

    For that act of professional candor, Hur was accused of gratuitous cruelty, of auditioning for a MAGA job, and of smearing a good man. The president summoned the cameras to prove his sharpness and promptly confused the leaders of Egypt and Mexico. The message to every Democrat watching was unmistakable: the penalty for telling the truth about Biden is excommunication.

    And the Platner parallel? Well, it's an example of Karl Marx being half-right about something: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second as farce.

    Only half-right? Yeah, both times were pretty farcical.

  • And also the fool. The great Jimmy G provides today's final commentary on a non mea culpa: Graham Platner Plays the Victim. But he's pretty brutal on a side issue:

    In a June 5 Fox News appearance, Maine Wire editor in chief Steven Robinson told Laura Ingraham that Platner’s business is “a campaign prop. . . . The oyster business, totally fake.”

    Now, calling Platner’s oyster business “totally fake” is hyperbolic; he does sell oysters to a restaurant his mother owns. But Platner had told the New Republic that he hadn’t paid himself a salary from his oyster business for the past five years. It would be interesting to see if Platner’s business has ever generated any profits after expenses, and whether the Internal Revenue Service would classify it as a hobby or a business for the question of deducting business expenses. (“The IRS safe harbor rule is typically that if you have turned a profit in at least three of five consecutive years, the IRS will presume that you are engaged in it for profit.”)

    PolitiFact rated Robinson’s statement “false,” based on his company’s having filed the proper paperwork with the state. Well, that’s one way to measure the legitimacy of a business, but the “no salary for five years,” “not making a living at it,” and “just one customer that is his mom” facts complicate the picture.

    Almost everybody, including the self-anointed fact-checkers, has a bad habit of seeing what they want to see.

    Gee, could Politifact be biased? Big if true.