As my grandmother would have said, Herschel Walker is "typical of his type."
Herschel Walker is yet another mendacious "Family Values" pretender, a corporate oligarch's wet dream about what a U.S. Senator should be -- "everything a man should be -- young, stupid and mean," in the immortal words of Ramona Ricketts in the movie, Crybaby,
Good commentary from Georgia Recorder by Jay Bookman:
COMMENTARY
Bookman: How much is too much for Herschel Walker’s ‘family-values’ voters?
Herschel Walker spoke in early 2022 at a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering in Atlanta. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
You can tell Herschel Walker was raised right. After all, only a gentleman would think to send a “Get well” card – hand-signed, from #34! — to the girlfriend whose abortion he had just financed.
That’s classy, or as close to classy as you’re going to find in this mess.
It is not classy to campaign on the theme that abortion – all abortion, even in cases of rape or incest – is murder, while you yourself have secretly “murdered.” It’s not classy to act all high and mighty and deny a choice to others that you yourself have exercised because you found the pregnancy you helped to create “inconvenient,” because you already had more outside children than you wanted to support.
Yet this is the man whom Georgia Republicans chose as their nominee for the U.S. Senate, the man whom they instructed in how to run a conservative “family-values” campaign. His opponents in the GOP primary warned their fellow Republicans that if they nominated Walker, this day would come. And it has come.
As Walker’s son Christian angrily posted on Monday: “’Family values,’ people? He has four kids, four different women, wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women.” According to the younger Walker, his father had also threatened to kill him and his mother, forcing them to move six separate times in six months in hopes of hiding from his wrath. Christian Walker also complained bitterly about the pressure that the right had secretly placed on him to be silent about his father, a request that he largely granted, he said, until finally the lies became too much to tolerate.
Lies and abortions
And yet, for the time being, Republicans at both the national and state levels are saying they stand behind Walker and his candidacy. What does “conservative” even mean anymore, if the lies and the abortions and fake charities and spousal abuse and violence mean nothing? Hypocrisy is always present in politics, among both parties, but the question has been asked often about Donald Trump, and it’s relevant again here: How much is too much?
Judging from the right’s continued support of Trump, the answer is that “too much” is an empty concept. Trump has survived and thrived through countless cruelties and crudities, and maybe, just maybe, that will prove the case here as well.
However, questions of morality aside — because clearly they aren’t being considered here – on sheer pragmatic grounds I have a hard time believing that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other national GOP figures will continue to pour tens of millions of dollars into Walker’s campaign against Sen. Raphael Warnock. I think the money spigots will soon run dry. With the midterms less than five weeks away, they ought to have other races in which to invest their cash, races in which the chances of success are now greater than here in Georgia.
In addition, the abortion question is causing problems for Republican candidates all over the country. Part of the Democrats’ message has been that Republicans claim to oppose abortion until their own wives, daughters, sisters, and lovers become pregnant, when suddenly arrangements are made that aren’t available to the poor and the less-connected. The Walker story dovetails too perfectly with that argument for Republicans to try to defend it.
From the beginning, Walker has been treated as nothing more than a tool, a weapon that Republicans could deploy to win a seat they wanted. They didn’t care that he was extremely ill-suited to that purpose, by nature and training, that he might be destroyed by it, together with his family members. We all kind of knew it would end this way, even if we could not have anticipated the details and timing.
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1 comment:
All conservatives know is that "Democrats are bad and "the left" is bad." They don't stop for a minute to reconsider that they just might be assed backwards and that it's the charlatans of the Republican Party causing most of the major problems that we've seen over the last 20 years. These people are saboteurs of government and empty suits. And when government doing things for people takes a back seat, power only shifts to the rich and they aren't making it rain! The days of millionaires and billionaires coming to town and making something out of the place is over. Nowadays they come to town and suck every penny they can out of the community and give almost nothing back. Republicans represent the people who do this all in the name of "freedom." And Donald Trump was not some knight in shining armor come to save everyone from the Republican establishment. Rather he is the vile manifestation of the establishment...get it? Just a nasty apex, New York predator similar to Bernie Madoff. And he dangled all kinds of things in front of conservatives faces... God, Guns, and white people! And then when they lifted their hands to cheer what did the snake oil salesmen do? He picked your pockets and gave you a false sense of the freedom that only people like him have. As usual, the joke is on conservatives.
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