Opinion | Paxton, Platner and the sorry demise of character in politics

You can explain away all the scandals that have beset Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. The tattoo of a Totenkopf, the death’s head emblem associated with Nazi concentration camp guards? That was a drunken mistake by a young Marine who didn’t know any better. His failure to remove it for nearly two decades? The self-professed “military history buff” found out about those associations only recently.