I really wanted to like David French. In fact, I did like David French. I enjoyed listening to him on the Dispatch podcasts — I listen to a lot of podcasts — and now, I have to tell you, I am not quite sure if I continue to like David French. Because what he has done here with Graham Platner makes me question his intellectual honesty.

The column ran in the New York Times this morning, under the title that names the move it is making. French walks the reader through Platner’s deleted Reddit posts, the Marines-era tattoo Platner has covered up, the I am a communist statement, the trolling. He concedes, in passing, that Platner has acknowledged the posts were wrong and deleted them, that the tattoo is covered, that the explanation Platner offered (a difficult period following repeated combat deployments) is the kind of explanation any honest reader would have to take seriously. He concedes, in passing, that Platner has the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He grants the substantive moral framework that would normally apply to a candidate with this kind of biographical record — that people can change, that redemption is real, that we should not define people by their worst moments.

And then he refuses to apply the framework he has just granted. The column’s central argument is that Democrats supporting Platner are doing what Republicans did with Trump — telling themselves the stakes are too high for normal standards, accepting a lesser evil because the greater evil is too terrifying to face honestly, beginning the slide that ends in cult-of-personality politics. The framing requires the reader to accept that Platner’s biographical record places him in the same moral-political category as Trump. The framing requires the reader to forget that French has just spent half the column granting that the biographical record admits of redemption-eligible explanations that the framing depends on disregarding. The framing requires the reader to accept that the lesser of two evils is the right description of what Maine voters are doing when they consider Platner against Susan Collins, on grounds that French presents as if they were obvious rather than as if they were the donor network’s preferred grounds being smuggled into the Times opinion page under the cover of moral-philosophical seriousness.