Herschel Walker, GOP poster boy

Commentary

One column by the WaPo’s Gene Robinson sums up all that’s wrong with the Republican Party…and the nation

I’ve been incredibly busy the last week or so on non-writing, family-oriented projects. So busy, exhausted actually, that I spent the entire day, and night, Monday, in bed. I don’t remember the last time I slept so long. Of course, I did get up in time to watch yesterday’s January 6 hearings. If you watched you would have to agree that Trump’s West Wing was a corrupt, evil, carnival, intent…and I use the word “intent” intentionally as that’s the only word between the “t-crossers” and “i-dotters” at the Department of Justice (I’m looking at you, Attorney General Merrick Garland)…and indicting Trump for planning and leading an insurrection that attempted to overturn the results of a legal election and bring down the American democracy.

Despite what we are all watching in plain sight, Republican leaders, elected and hoping to be elected, continue to support the “Big Lie” and, by extension, Donald Trump. As do a majority of Republican voters. Their blind allegiance to this grifter and his scams, his hustles, his flimflam, is incredulous.

Having said that, I thought I’d focus today on an example of one Republican wannabe elected official, Herschel Walker, who is running for the Senate from Georgia against incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock.

And since my writing is a little rusty, I’ll use a column from one of my go-to columnists, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, as the basis for my incredulity.

Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and the Post’s associate editor, headlined his column, “Walker win would mean US has lost its mind.” His lede,

It’s not yet clear who will be the weirdest and most unfit Republican Senate candidate in November. But my early pick is Herschel Walker in Georgia. If he wins — and he could — this nation has truly lost its mind.

Robinson’s support?

• Regarding African-American Fathers: [The] “father- less home is a major, major problem in the Black community. The father leaves in the Black family. He leaves the boys alone so they’ll be raised by their mom. If you have a child with a woman, even if you have to leave that woman . . . you don’t leave that child.” As Robinson points out, that stance became a punchline when it was revealed that Walker, who proudly describes his relationship with his 22-year-old son Christian, is also the father of three other children of whom he does not speak — and with whom he is not in regular contact.
• Regarding lies: Walker claimed he graduated from college when he didn’t, claimed he had “worked in law enforcement” when he didn’t, and claimed he owned “the largest minority-owned chicken business in the United States” when he didn’t.
• Regarding climate change: “We don’t control the air. Our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air has got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we’ve got we to clean that back up.”
• Regarding evolution: “At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not? … If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”
• Regarding COVID: “Do you know, right now, I have something that can bring you into a building that would clean you from COVID as you walk through this dry mist?”
• Regarding the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting: “Cain killed Abel and that’s a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation — what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way.”

Huh?

As I mentioned, Walker is running against incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock who is defending the seat he won in a special election in 2020. Senator Warnock is also a Baptist pastor, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr.’s former congregation. During his short tenure in the Senate, Warnock has co-sponsored an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and, in his first floor speech, argued for the passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

As Eugene Robinson points out in his column,

Despite the choice between crazed and competent, polls show Walker and Warnock in a statistical tie.

“A STATISTICAL TIE!”

I call it incredulous. Some may call it incredible, others unbelievable. Call it what you want. But you cannot deny this: Herschel Walker is the walking, talking, incoherent embodiment of the Republican Party today.