The Poisonous Susan Collins
Every time I walk through a nursery, I drift in the direction of a plant called oleander. It turns out that I’m a sucker for everything about it. It grows nicely in the heat of Oklahoma, and it’s got meaty little leaves on upright stems. Even at the end of the spring-summer sales season, there are plenty of pots on the racks in the nurseries, and the blossoms are in my neighborhood on the color wheel. I feel that I could do them justice.
The problem is that everything about oleander is poisonous, a sinister little fact the label never tells you. There’s not enough toxin to kill either you or your dog, but enough to stir up diarrhea and vomiting. Think of it as cyclosporiasis on a stick. However often I’m tempted, I always turn my back.
You probably know what’s coming next: same exact thing with Susan Collins. She looks like a Republican a Democrat could trust. Next to her rabid colleagues in the Senate, she’s demure, well-spoken, restrained, and reasonable, the oleander calling for a place in your garden. If you’re wary of a repeat on Marjorie Taylor Greene (who now looks like Eleanor Roosevelt in retrospect), Susan Collins is decidedly not your woman. The senator is a summer garden party who would never track poo onto your living room carpet.
The problem is that she’s a terrible politician, always promising more than she delivers, pretending to be a locus of good sense. Very occasionally, she pulls it off. She has been moderately oppositional on Trump’s tariff program and had some good things to say about the Big Ugly Budget Bill. Some Maine voters appreciate her focus on the shoreline and every godforsaken little firehouse in the state. Collins knows her way around pork projects like a pig farmer.
But after an elaborate dumb show of “careful study,” she gave us a rapist and drunkard for the Court. It was a straight shot from there to overturning Roe v. Wade. Just last week, she defended the grotesque Jay Clayton, Drumpf’s candidate for the Department of National Intelligence. When Clayton refused to confirm that Biden won the presidency, the knife-wielding Jon Ossoff chopped him to pieces. Collins meanwhile demurely noted that the Intelligence Director does not certify elections. “Cop-out” does not begin to do her justice. Then she switched sides on the notorious Save America Act. The end of democracy is now within easy reach.
But her real moral failure lay in another realm. ICE keeps killing the “wrong” people in the street. You either think that’s bad or you go to hell. Susan Collins is going to hell. When Johan Guererro was slaughtered last week in Maine, good people pointed their fingers at ICE. Collins pointed her bony little finger at Democrats, who had failed to cut a new check for the agency. Never mind that it is working with more money than God.
But speaking of checks, send one today. The candidate in question is Troy Jackson of Maine. He may not be the candidate I would have chosen (he’s grimly focused on the sins of the Israeli government), but Netanyahu himself says that it’s time go it alone militarily. Jackson could be the man to defeat Senator Oleander. Somebody’s got to do it, and I’m banking on him.