Maine Democrats’ deeply-troubled U.S. Senate nominee-in-waiting, Graham Platner, is still considered the favorite in his bid to unseat moderate incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). Collins has defied the odds before, as we’ve noted previously, winning comfortably in 2020 even after every single public poll projected she’d lose. But this cycle is proving to be a challenging one for her, and for Republicans generally, so we’ll see how things unfold.Platner’s latest attack has been that Collins voted to send him to war in Iraq, which elides the reality that Platner volunteered to go to Iraq well after Collins had already cast a vote in favor of that conflict (alongside two subsequent Democratic presidential nominees). Platner later re-enlisted and returned to the theater with the private military contractor Blackwater.He posted extensively online about his long-standing desire to go off and fight, writing that by being deployed, “we got what we wished for,” adding that he’d be “lying if I said it wasn’t something I enjoyed.” He’s now cynically pretending that Collins condemned him to that fate, for political reasons. When she mildly pointed out the relevant timeline, he quickly accused her of blaming the troops for her political judgment, a clumsy deflection.