Rep. Max Miller, running for re-election in Ohio, is allegedly (not that I doubt the allegations) a slimy, abusive creep who withheld his daughter’s favorite plush toy, the one she can’t sleep without. For some reason, that kind of petty cruelty creeps me out even more than the openly brutal abuse he’s accused of (no, I’m not excusing that). An article in American Prospect shows that much like the Toddler in the White House, Miller has an (alleged) track record of being spiteful and vicious to everyone who crosses him.
Nevertheless he’s choosing to stay in the race so Republicans are stuck with him. His best defense so far? Well, if Emily Moreno had been abused, would she have cooked him dinner? Yeah, it’s not like women with psycho partners ever make nice out of fear, hoping to defuse them.
In any case, Florida State Senator Joe Gruters, chair of the Republican National Committee says the abuse not an issue: ““We’re gonna support our nominees …We need to make sure we hold the majorities. Max, I’m sure, is on that side.” He dismisses the accusations by saying “there’s not many things worse than divorce.” Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s father in law, did come out against him but as I mentioned last week, he took his time, presumably hoping the scandal would blow over.
Given the Toddler of the United States has shielded multiple creeps and sexual harassers from federal investigation this is not surprising. Even for a sane political party, there’s pressure to be cold-blooded and practical, to turn a blind eye. And if it’s something like adultery that might be the right choice; even if we disapprove, we typically don’t have a better candidate to pick.
But if, like Gruters, we have no lines in the sand, we also have no principles. At worst, Gruters is one of those shits who think a man has every right to treat a woman that way; at best he opposes abuse in general, just not when he’s forced to criticie a fellow Republican. Come on, don’t you have sympathy for his position? He has no choice but to back Miller.
Wrong. He does have a choice. And the choice me made says he doesn’t oppose abuse, even if he tells himself otherwise. “Against abuse when it’s politically safe” is no better than “honest when convenient.”
Power cannot be the only standard. Democrats abandoning a credibly accused rapist such as Graham Platner was the right move, even if it had guaranteed Susan Collins gets re-elected (from what I’ve read, the seat is still in play).
Paul Campos at LGM quotes a commenter who makes another relevant point re Miller and the Toddler: “as a rich and powerful person, outside of a very narrow range of actions, you are largely protected from consequences, and other elites will seek to shield you from consequences to maintain the fiction that elites are deserving of their status. If someone like Trump were treated like a regular person, this would threaten elite status generally. Trump learned he could do what he wanted, and others would simply clean up after him, because this was easier, and it maintained a lot of fictions that were very valuable to other people.” That’s not an attitude we should encourage.
I see a lot of that attitude in the way our society deals with rape. We live in a country where judges have said flat out that they don’t want to prosecute a teenage rapist because it would ruin his future. If Brett Kavanaugh hadn’t gotten his SCOTUS seat, he’d still have had a lifetime position on the federal bench. Even a slight bump in a man’s career over rape allegations was too much for some conservatives. Drawing lines in the sand and responding appropriately when those lines are crossed matters. Show that this shit is unacceptable and, ideally, that there are consequences. Miller has avoided them for most of his life.
As commenter Murc says at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Platner, rapist or not, would still be better in the Senate than Collins. When earlier allegations about Platner’s cheating and bad behavior came to light, “still better than a Republican” was one of the defenses raised. As Murc says, “the flip side of that is ‘there are in fact actual red lines beyond which this calculus no longer applies’ … Standards matter. There are more important things than the naked pursuit of power, and frankly orienting yourself purely towards power seeking is almost going to completely eliminate your ability to effectively USE said power.”
Someone else at LGM linked to a post at Slacktivist about the temptation to divide people into “ours” and “theirs”: “one of the obsessions I obsess about here became one of the obsessions I obsess about there — the toxic danger of distinguishing between “people” and “our people” and the realization that no good can ever come of pursuing such a distinction. And so now, for me, “Taking care of our people” is just “Taking care of people.””
As the Prospect article shows, the media have been astonishingly supine about Miller. The author suggests reporters just gave up because there’s no “shaming the shameless” and none of the coverage he did get has to date hurt his career. I think that’s inadequate as a reason. It’s unprofessional as far as news coverage but it shows the advantage the right-wing noise machine has. They’ll repeat accusations against Democrats day in and day out until it defines them and even the mainstream media start to accept that framing.
As I want Republicans to have increasingly little power, I hope Miller goes down. But I also want him to go down because if the allegations are true he’s a horrible human being. He does not belong anywhere near power or, well, other human beings he might hurt. I hope Ohio’s voters agree.
