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One of my favorite influencers is Under the Desk News, who didn’t hold back calling Susan Collins a “homewrecking hoe.” A journalist for the Bollard in Maine put up a post about Susan Collins throwing stones about infidelity, and says it’s been “an open secret in Washington DC for decades but the WSJ & NY Times have never proved it. Wonder why?”

The allegation is that Collins carried on a long-term affair with the man who would become her husband and that she convinced him to leave his cancer-stricken wife before she died.

That means Daffron married Collins during the period between Margot’s cancer diagnosis and her death.

The exact circumstances of Daffron’s divorce from Margot are not part of the public record, and there is no public evidence proving that Collins was responsible for the breakup of the marriage. Nevertheless, the timeline raises questions that many Maine voters may find uncomfortable.

The documented sequence of events is straightforward:

Reasonable people can draw their own conclusions about the optics of that timeline. At a minimum, it reflects poorly on a husband who remarried while his former spouse was battling a terminal illness—and on Susan Collins, who apparently saw nothing troubling about entering into that marriage under those circumstances.

One thing is for sure. If Collins was a Democrat rather than a Republican, Fox, OAN, Newsmax and other partisan media outlets would likely devote far more attention to the story and demand additional documentation about the divorce and the circumstances surrounding the relationship.

Fox would no doubt use their patented favorite technique of “some people say” to discuss the alleged affair and introduce the possiblity that Thomas divorced his wife after her diagnosis to marry Susan Collins. If you recall, that’s what the right-wing media machine did with Obama’s birth certificate. Instead of billboards asking where the birth certificate is, there would be billboards asking where the divorce papers are:

I wrote extensively yesterday about the double standard in how Platner and Paxton have been scrutinized, but there is another double standard worth noting: the one between Platner and his Republican opponent, Susan Collins.