Herschel Walker Reminds Me of a President...

The New Yorker has run a piece attacking Herschel Walker, who is running as the Republican challenger to Senator Raphael Warnock.

As a liberty-loving American, I see that race as lose-lose: Both candidates are horrendous and come with plenty of personal baggage. Even judging who is worse is so difficult that I'd consider sitting that election out if I were a Georgian.

And that would be true even if Walker weren't basically a theocrat.

Consider the first paragraph:

Trump's post-electoral antics helped elect Walker's opponent, Raphael Warnock (above). (Image by Rebecca Hammel (U.S. Senate Photographic Studio), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

A week ago, the Republican Party's nominee for the United States Senate from Georgia explained his opposition to the Green New Deal. Given the decades of Republican denials, obfuscations, and outright falsehoods on the subject of climate change, it would be difficult for nearly any G.O.P. candidate's erroneous comments to stand out. It was a challenge Herschel Walker, a former N.F.L. star, was ready to meet. He explained, "Since 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 got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we got to clean that back up." [link omitted]

Lord.

If anything can make an arguably genocidal prescription for poverty like the Green New Deal sound like it deserves serious consideration, it's opposition like that. (In Walker's defense, this isn't much worse than the timidity and evasion many other Republicans have offered in the face of the green anti-energy agenda.)

Walker might vote the way I'd like on that issue, but the last thing we need is a know-nothing like this as face of the side of technological progress in this life-and-death issue. As we saw through an entire term of Donald Trump, such rambling is worse than merely squandering a chance to make a pro-freedom, pro-prosperity, pro-human flourishing case for the continued use of fossil fuels and nuclear power: It gives people like the author of this New Yorker piece fodder to smear their opponents. Perhaps the lone saving grace is that Walker, unlike Trump, doesn't seem to go out of his way to antagonize anyone.

As with his backing of the tele-quack Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate race, Trump has shown his contempt for appealing to the intelligence of the voter, as well as his contempt for expertise as such all at once.

This might win elections in the short term, but it will cost minds in the long term, and that's what America ultimately need to change course -- as her founding pamphleteers showed so eloquently in the years leading up to our Revolution.

And this brings me to the end of the last paragraph of this piece:

No one in the G.O.P. leadership can possibly believe that Walker is fit to hold a Senate seat, but the hope -- as dangerous as it is cynical -- is that he may be able to win one. And that joke would most certainly be on us. [bold added]

Get a load of this, coming from someone who is holding himself out as thoughtful and on the right side of history, as it were. His description of the inarticulate Walker and the cynicism behind the GOP backing him reminds me of nothing so much as the Democratic nomination of the senile and no less inarticulate Joe Biden for the Presidency.

It's true that Trump despises rational political debate, but it is clear to me that the Democrats also do.

Both "sides" at this point simply want power and are nakedly grasping for it -- as witness the strange, short-range willingness of each side to support candidates that are basically gifts to the other side.

Unless one party improves or is replaced by a better one, it is America that will keep losing in every election.

-- CAV