Maine socialists try again with another he-man fake to sub for Graham Platner

Here Maine goes again.The state’s new far-left contender for the Democratic Party’s US Senate nomination is a faux populist with a wicked reactionary streak.Until five minutes ago, his immigrant-hating, anti-abortion platform was so extreme it would spook even the staunchest Republican.He’s a local pol so desperate to make it in the big leagues that he’s cosplaying as a progressive working man unafraid to get his hands dirty.He is Troy Jackson, fifth-generation Maine logger and wannabe US senator, and he’s got the Bernie Sanders seal of approval to replace accused rapist Graham Platner on the Democrats’ midterm election ballot.Influential Dems are betting the chance for a Senate majority on a 58-year-old former radical right-winger who’s transformed himself into a socialist darling.“He was a logger by trade so he’s got that Maine log man in him,” enthused former political operative Kurt Bardella.But while some see a sexy macho man, I smell an abject phony.On the surface, Jackson seems to check all the necessary boxes to defeat GOP Sen.Susan Collins — as Platner appeared to do, before his campaign crashed and burned.Union member? Check.Virile manual laborer? Ditto.Yet from where I sit, he’s a blow-with-the-wind, say-anything-believe-nothing fake who’s out for nothing but personal gain.And those are his good points.Jackson’s legislative history is marked by obsessions with those he viewed as job-stealing immigrants, as well as a scary preoccupation with what women do with their bodies.He first rose to political prominence in 1998, when he led a blockade aimed at keeping Canadian workers from crossing the US border.He was a Republican then, but the anti-immigrant and nationalist rhetoric he pushed was excessive even for the GOP.And long after he found opportunity as a Democrat, he continued banging the anti-immigrant drum.Until recently, he’s moaned about seeing “countless foreign loggers cross the border every single day to work in our...