Video of the 2003 recording, released three years after Cash's death, with lip-synching tribute cameos by a host of mostly engagé celebrities including, of all people, Kid Rock.
Thoughts of Johnny Cash raised by our old friend Hunter Biden, who has recently surfaced on Twitter as a first-class shitposter, answering an insult from some Republican fool using the Johnny Cash finger-giving photo as his avi:
Bravo to Hunter Biden. Well done. I like this informed swagger.
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 7:53 PM
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Note how he's not by any means suggesting he's as cool as Johnny Cash; he's reminding us that Cash was once as low and fucked up as Hunter Biden has ever been, and for a pretty long while before he ended up the great songwriter and performer we all remember with fondness and awe. Which Hunter is not, presumably, at least not yet, but he's working on himself and getting better.
And also of what a flaming liberal Cash became too, something the Republican fool clearly has no idea of—not mixing it up with party politics, but working with the deprived and defeated, stressing the liberal message that, as Hunter put it, no one is past saving. If you've done some horrible stuff in your life, you can try to be better. And God will surely cut you down either way.
Which brings us inevitably to the Maine Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner, whose primary is tomorrow. Well, maybe not that inevitably.
I was kind of hoping to have finished writing about Platner, but then came the new allegations, in The New York Times, no less, that he had not only joined the Marines and served in the abominable Afghanistan and Iraq wars, entered some kind of connection with the horrible Blackwater company or something related to it, and at some point in a Croatian tattoo parlor gotten himself a tattoo with the insignia of the elite "Totenkopf" 3rd Panzer Division of the Waffen-SS (a paramilitary organization of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei that operated independently of the German Army, and certainly committed some really horrific war crimes and crimes against humanity), and posted some pretty awful and politically incorrect posts on Reddit,—but also apparently been kind of shitty with between one and three of six women he dated between around 2013 and 2021 that The Times was able to interview, promiscuous, drinking to excess, and in the one case possibly something akin to violence.
And then posted a bunch of "sexually explicit messages" with some other women in 2023, around the time he got married; it was his wife Amy Gertner who revealed the last in fall 2025 to a campaign aide, Genevieve McDonald, who thereupon resigned from the campaign (over the Totenkopf and the Reddit posts) and then months later, it seems, passed the story to The Wall Street Journal and The Times:
In a statement released by the campaign, Ms. Gertner suggested that she had been betrayed by Ms. McDonald, saying she was “deeply hurt” and bothered by “the invasion of our privacy.”
“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind.”
“Our marriage today is stronger than ever before,” she added. “I know the man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst days of my life. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.”
What Platner has in common with Johnny Cash and Hunter Biden is that arc of a life story from horrible behavior through regret to trying to be better, in his case, as I was saying in the earlier post, through therapy, his counselor (primarily for PTSD), hers, and the one they share for marriage counseling. It's a great story of redemption. Honestly, it's a great story whether it's true or not, and the other thing, which is vitally important, is that enough Maine voters seem to have bought it, women in particular, according to polling from last week:
The survey of 650 likely Maine voters shows Platner has the support of 48% of respondents, compared to 43% for Collins, with 6% undecided and 2% supporting another candidate. A gender gap exists among polltakers who back each candidate: 54% of women and 42% of men support Platner, while Collins earns the support of 35% of women and 51% of men.
And of course they hate Trump, the Iran war, and the price of gas, And it's their decision. It's interesting he has so much less support from men, and it may have something to do with his earnest denial of the toxic masculinity he started with (I'm sure his main reason for joining hte Marines was to piss off his sensible bourgeois parents),, and use of therapeutic language, his continual admission that he used to be bad (this was the campaign tactic I was urging him to adopt in May, and he's done it—also it's completely unlike John Fetterman, who has never acknowledged doing anything wrong, and also adopted a more "popularist" list of policies compared to Platner's openly leftist one). He's working on it, and that doesn't happen in a straight line and may not happen at all, but you're not getting certainty.
Platner's done plenty of retail politicking, Maine-style, and they feel they know him. I kind of doubt the new stories have changed that significantly any more.than the earlier ones did. I'm not saying I believe his story in detail or I don't, I'm saying at this point it's none of my business, but I'm absolutely convinced it could work out just fine, OK?
