Making a Mockery of Us
Herschel Walker - the reductio absurdum of the GOP's contempt for us all
The Daily Beast’s report this week that Herschel Walker paid for a woman to have an abortion in 2009 set off a media firestorm. Perhaps most notably, Walker’s 22-year old son, Christian, himself a right-wing conservative who had previously expressed support for his father’s Senate candidacy, lit into Herschel after the report dropped Monday night and has posted several other attacks on his father since. This opening salvo on Twitter sums up pretty well Christian’s beef with his dad:
Herschel Walker flatly denied the initial report and said he didn’t know the woman making the allegations. That claim became less sustainable when the Daily Beast published a follow up report yesterday that the same woman has had a child with Walker. Walker still claims it’s a lie that he paid for an abortion and also told reporters today there was no abortion, in spite of the fact that he’d earlier told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that the abortion was nothing to be ashamed of.
When asked to explain that apparent contradiction, here’s how Walker responded:
“No, what I said — I was talking about something totally different than what did happen,” Walker explained. “I said, when I, with my ex-wife, in my past, had nothing to do with what this woman said. I said this, this here abortion thing is false, it’s a lie. And that’s what I said. I said anything happened with my ex-wife or what Christian was talking about — I don’t know, but as I said, if anything happened I have nothing to be ashamed of. My ex-wife and I have been the best of friends with her husband and my wife. So that’s the things I’ve said. And I said nothing about if it did happen. Because I said that’s a lie.”
Meanwhile, Walker’s GOP allies are rallying to his defense, variously arguing that the reporting is a liberal hit job; that Walker has changed and deserves forgiveness; that he doesn’t owe anyone an apology, because paying for one abortion is nothing compared to enabling abortions, as Walker’s opponent, Senator Raphael Warnock does; that because Walker is a man of Christ he will be the most consequential member of the United States Senate (Newt Gingrich said that). And so on.
What does this all mean? On the one hand, this is all what you’d expect. We’re a month out from election day, and the Walker/Warnock race could well decide control of the Senate. Of course, his GOP backers are going to go to the mat for him. That’s politics. Further, many GOP Members of Congress are, as I’ve said before, internet trolls with committee assignments. Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Ted Cruz and lots more may speak in complete sentences (questionable in Gohmert’s case). But their utterances, as well as those of other GOP aspirants to high office, amount to little more than gleeful nihilism and utter contempt for the very idea of a shared factual reality or of any aspiration to generate policies that might improve the lives of ordinary people.
So, yes, one way to understand Walker is as nothing special. If he wins, he’ll just be one more contemptible officeholder, who will use his vote to further afflict the afflicted and comfort the already comfortable, consistent with the right-wing project that Walker’s allies in Congress have long been agitating for.
On the other hand, Herschel Walker is a particularly deficient human being. He may well be suffering from some form of brain damage because of the many years of hits to the head he took while playing football. People around him regard him as a pathological liar. He cannot answer a question coherently. Indeed, he can barely speak like an adult. He appears to know literally nothing about what government does, what we mean when we talk about climate change, what happened on 9/11 or any matter of public significance. His sentences amount to a garbled pastiche of right-wing talking points about media elites, liberals, Washington and politicians. The depth of his limitations brings into especially sharp relief the perversity and cruelty of the GOP project and its mocking contempt for the idea that the elected stewards of the public good should give a single solitary shit about serving it.
In sum, he’s a sick joke who has a good chance of winning a seat in the United States Senate.
Walker himself is pathetic. What he represents is sickening.
Well said!!