A Long List Of UN-Qualifications

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2022, Environmental Issues, Global Issues, Political commentary, Social commentary

I’ve written before about Herschel Walker, the former footballer who is now running for a seat in the United States Senate from the state of Georgia.  Walker … well, I think he may have taken a few too many hits to the head in his football career, because I swear that every time he opens his mouth, it comes out stupid.  But his take on the well-being of the planet and life here on Planet Earth is simply jaw-dropping.  Back in July, he gave a speech and had a rather convoluted take on air quality and how he thinks it works …

“We in America have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world. The U.S would spend millions of billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. 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, while they’re messing ours up. So what we’re doing is just spending money. Until these other countries can get on board and clean what they got up, it ain’t going to help us to start cleaning our stuff up. We’re already doing it the right way.”

And then on Sunday, in response to the environmental protections built into the newly-signed Inflation Reduction Act, he had this to say …

“They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not. Because a lot of money, it’s going to trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?”

I literally grabbed my head and groaned when I read that one.  I think, perhaps, Mr. Walker has already suffered from oxygen deprivation at some point in his life!  No, Herschel, we don’t have enough trees, but what we do have a surplus of is ignorant wanna-be members of Congress!  Please, Georgians, do not send this man to Washington!

There is a complete roster of highly unqualified and improbably candidates on the Republican ticket this year, and Eugene Robinson has done a great job of highlighting the worst of the worst, with the conclusion that while the former guy’s picks have racked up points in the primaries, they may well have brought about the opposite when it comes to November’s election …

Which Republican Senate candidate is worst? There are so many choices!

Eugene Robinson

22 August 2022

The race for the title of most incompetent, least electable Republican candidate for the Senate has become a real competition. Thanks, Donald Trump.

The former president’s endorsements led enough bad Senate nominees to primary victories that the GOP’s hopes of seizing control of the chamber — in what should be a Republican year — are fading. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) acknowledged ruefully last week that “candidate quality” is an issue. The “lack thereof” might have been implied, but his point was obvious.

Former football star Herschel Walker, whom Trump muscled his party into nominating against Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael G. Warnock in Georgia, had an early lead in the contest for hands-down-worst Republican standard-bearer. His across-the-board incoherence remains unmatched. But while Walker trails in the polls, he is actually doing better than some of his Trump-endorsed counterparts in other states.

Take Mehmet Oz, who trails Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman by 7½ points in the RealClearPolitics polling average in the battle for retiring GOP Sen. Patrick J. Toomey’s Pennsylvania seat.

It makes sense that Trump, a former reality television star, backed a reality television physician. But Oz’s supposed media savvy hasn’t made up for his other problems, chief among them, a lack of connection to the state he wants to represent.

Oz, a longtime New Jersey resident, only moved to Pennsylvania two years ago. Fetterman’s campaign has made gleeful, social-media-friendly hay from that fact, pushing for Oz to be nominated to the New Jersey hall of fame and spotlighting the number of Oz’s residences.

It certainly didn’t help last week that a video of Oz going grocery shopping and complaining about inflation went viral. Oz was trying to portray himself as Joe Average. He did not succeed.

In the video, first he gets the name of the store wrong — it was a Redner’s, a well-known Pennsylvania-based chain, not “Wegner’s,” as he called it. He then examines some raw broccoli, asparagus and carrots, and explains, “My wife wants some vegetables for crudités.” Fetterman, a cargo-shorts and hoodie-wearing Joe Average in everything but height, responded: “In PA, we call this a veggie tray” and issued a bumper sticker with the slogan “Let Them Eat Crudité.”

Then there’s Blake Masters. In Arizona, Republicans had high hopes of defeating incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who looked vulnerable. But Trump pushed the GOP to nominate Masters, a venture capitalist and political novice who has disturbing support from far-right extremists, and who backs Trump’s false claims about the purported illegitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

Masters has also attacked McConnell as being “not good at” legislating and has called for him to be replaced as GOP leader in the Senate. While Kelly’s political skills are seen by Democratic strategists as less than dazzling, a Fox News poll last week found him leading Masters by eight points, 50 percent to 42 percent.

In Ohio, the GOP ought to have had a lock on retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman’s seat; Trump won the state by eight points in 2020. But a mid-August poll by Emerson College showed Republican J.D. Vance ahead of Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan by a mere three points, and a string of earlier polls by the nonpartisan Center Street PAC consistently showed Ryan in the lead.

Vance might have gotten rich writing his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” but Ryan has deep roots in the state’s post-industrial Youngstown area. Vance was stridently anti-Trump before he became stridently pro-Trump, and — like Walker, Oz and Masters — he is a political novice.

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a MAGA true-believer, trails Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes by four points, 50 percent to 46 percent, in a recent Fox News poll. Even Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is suddenly running for his political life against his likely challenger, Democratic Rep. Val Demings. The polling averages have Rubio ahead; but the only recent survey, by the University of North Florida, showed Demings with a four-point lead. These races are close. And given polling errors in Democrats’ favor in recent elections, the contests might be even fiercer than these figures indicate.

Still, if the GOP snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and falls short in the Senate, Trump will be to blame. It is not clear what impact the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Roe v. Wade — made possible by the three justices Trump appointed — will have on Democratic turnout. But if voters across the country come out in huge numbers to support abortion rights, as they did in the recent Kansas referendum, then all bets are off.

Could Democrats even keep their majority in the House? Still unlikely. But watch this space, because it looks impossible to overestimate the damage Trump can do to his own party.

26 thoughts on “A Long List Of UN-Qualifications”

  4. In regard to this widespread, unqualified candidates running for office as (radical Trumpian?) Republicans, especially for Secretaries of State (overturn votes) in several swing states across the nation… I have always asked ANYONE I stumble into a conversation with about this epidemic…

    If you were to take a transcontinental flight around the world in an Airbus A380 or a Boeing 747-8, would you do it with a school bus driver and school-crossing officers as your pilots and flight-crew?

    If you were being deployed into real-life combat in the middle of a warzone, and your commander handed you a slingshot as your weapon and his/her only experience in military leadership, tactics, & weaponry was 2-hours playing WW1 video-wargame “Isonzo,” how would you like your chances of survival? Or…

    If you needed your new, sophisticated natural gas-lines installed in your large, gourmet, $300k home kitchen, would you call a taxi-driver to do it?

    Astoundingly, this IS what the Trumpian Republican Party is doing and those candidates are also selling their ignorant souls to the Cult Leader with one MAJOR condition…

    “Kiss my Orange Orangutan ass whenever I ask you too.” Donny J. Trump

    🤦‍♂️ SMH

    Liked by 2 people

    • Your questions here put this into a perspective that even a 5-year-old child could understand! Thanks, Prof … you’ve given me an idea for another post sometime in the next few days! As always, you are spot on!

      Are you and your mom both feeling better?

      Liked by 1 person

      • Mom has recovered to almost 100%. She seemed to have contracted a milder subvariant of the subvariant. 😉 Or she is just touch as nails. Probably the latter.

        I on the other hand, am still dealing with Omicron’s nasal drainage & phlegm in the chest with infrequent coughing spells. And I still do not have my full energy back. Grrrrrrr. 🙄 I’d say I’m about 85% back to normal, if these persistent symptoms would just go away.

        Thank you so much Jill for asking. ❤️

        Liked by 1 person

        • A mixed bag, then. I’m so happy that your mom is doing better … yeah, she’s probably like me, a tough ol’ biddy! And on the flip side, I’m so sorry that you’re still under the weather! When I had my heart issues (that are still ongoing), the main frustration was the loss of energy … I just couldn’t seem to make my body get up and do what needed to be done! As my late ex-husband used to say, “my get up and go, got up and went”. If you’re at 85%, then you’re getting there, my friend. The thing that helps me most every day is telling myself, “Head up, shoulders back, it’s mind over matter and my mind is strong!” And then, somehow, I manage to do what I need to do. Take care, Prof. We need you!

          Liked by 1 person

  5. Pingback: A LONG LIST OF UN – QUALIFICATIONS. |jilldennison.com | Ramblings of an Occupy Liberal

  6. Jill, as noted, there are a number of less than qualified candidates running for office for the first time. That is harmful to our democracy when we don’t elect better candidates. Yet, we also have some long term elected officials who can rival the poor quality of a few of the new candidates. Republican Senator Ron Johnson is a good case in point, especially when people who serve on the same committee from the same party distance themselves from the Senator’s more extreme opinions. The Dems have a few candidates that are little too zealous, but this independent voter does not see this is a normal distribution. Gerrymandering has allowed more extreme voices to win GOP primaries, s problem noted for several years by Republicans.

    I do not like Dems switching parties to get the least palatable GOP candidate to win the primary, as anything can happen in the general election. I don’t want the Taylor-Greens of the GOP to win as it lowers the bar for all of us.

    Keith

    Liked by 5 people

    • Oh, I fully agree that there are some long-term members of Congress whose poor quality rivals even that of Walker, Greene, etc. There is, as you mention, Ron Johnson, and then Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell as well. I just saw that Matt Gaetz won his primary and I don’t even know why he was allowed on the ballot! There will always be a few controversial figures on both sides of the aisle, but at this juncture, I think there is not a single member of Congress on the Democratic side whose conscience is lacking like so many on the Republican side of the aisle. One party cares only about profit, the other cares about people. Gerrymandering and political donations are our two biggest hurdles today when it comes to truly fair and honest elections. The candidate with the most money wins. Sigh. Citizens United — the Supreme Court made a supreme error in judgment there.

      No, I’m not a fan of that game-playing some Dems have done to get the least-electable Republicans on the ballot … it seems dishonest to me, and the Democrats should shine as the party of integrity, not dirty tricks.

      Like

  8. Pingback: A Long List Of UN-Qualifications | Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News

  9. Unfortunately, in both 2016, and even moreso in 2020, and probably in 2018, the GOP have proved their voters don’t care about qualifications, only about their willingness to try to prevent Dems from doing anything useful. There has to come a backlash. Most Americans want a sane government. The need is to convince them they have to vote for sanity in order to achieve it. And the more insane the Republican candidates are, as noted above, the greater the need for sane voters to get out and vote!

    Liked by 4 people

    • No, they don’t seem to care so much about qualifications but are more interested in empty promises, not being intelligent enough to realize just how empty those promises are. I think perhaps the “American Experiment” is coming to an end, is about to blow up in our faces, perhaps literally. I think, in all honesty, that we have passed the point of no return, that a complete demolishing of the entire system is what the future holds for this nation. I’m not sure there are enough intelligent and caring people out there to save it now.

      Like

  10. The Republicans are just like the political party, ruling over where I’m living, speaking the lies, thinking that, we’re all too, retarded, that we will, follow them, and, the majority of the population is doing that, with, only, a few handfuls of, minority like us, who know, that, it’s, all, bullshit.

    Liked by 2 people

    • I think that is one of the things I most resent about them … that they seem to think we’re too stupid or ignorant to see through their outright lies, to understand that they are stabbing us in the back.

      Like

Comments are closed.