It’s been a rather crazy week … but then, this is a rather crazy world we live in, isn’t it? The crazier it gets, the more material the political cartoonists have to work with, and they haven’t let an opportunity slip this week. I just wish I had a teensy portion of the talent they have to say so much with few or no words. Our friend TokyoSand over at Political Charge has, as she always does, gone out and found some of the very best ones for our enjoyment. Here are just a few, but be sure to click the link at the bottom to see all the rest! Thank you, TS!!!
It was a very bad week for Republicans and Trump. Here’s how editorial cartoonists covered some of the biggest political news stories of the week. You can enjoy more of each cartoonist’s work by clicking on their hyperlinked name.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry over this video clip of the very unqualified-for-senate candidate Herschel Walker. There will be a runoff election in Georgia on December 6th between Senator Raphael Warnock and this former footballer … let us hope that common sense prevails!!!
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve shared TokyoSand’s weekly collection of political cartoons, so I thought this week would be a good time to share them with you. Care to take any guesses as to what the main topic on the cartoonists’ collective mind was this week? Yep, the U.S. elections and that ‘red wave’ that so many had pinned their hopes on but that failed to materialize. Now that most of us have breathed a faint sigh of relief, we can have a few laughs over it. Thank you, TS, for finding the best cartoons for us this week!
Despite the Republican Party and most of the media buying into the prediction of a red wave, it never materialized on Election Night. In fact, this is the first time since 1936 that the sitting president’s party didn’t lose a single state legislative chamber in a midterms! For all of you who voted, this is what you made happen. Enjoy!
That last one is my FAVOURITE!!! Be sure to check out all the rest of the cartoons over at Political Charge!
As I struggled with motivation, or rather a lack thereof, this morning, I thought perhaps this would be a good time to visit TokyoSand over at Political Charge and see if she had done her usual posting of the week’s best political ‘toons. Sure enough, I was not disappointed! Naturally, the main topic of the week was Herschel Walker’s utterly ludicrous campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate … I’m so sick of hearing his name that if I never hear it again it will be too soon. But other topics vied for space as well, such as Hurricane Ian, women fighting for their rights in Iran, Vladimir Putin’s failing war against Ukraine, the Supreme Court and more. Thank you, T.S., for bringing us the best of the best each week!
Down to the finish line, people. Elections just about a month away. A ton of races to keep track of, but if you’re looking for diversion, you’ll find some of the Senate campaigns really … unusual.
In a normal year — OK, let’s just admit there hasn’t been any such thing for ages. But if normal years existed in American politics and this was one of them, we could reasonably assume the Republicans were going to be big winners. You know, two years after one party takes control in Washington, voters have a tendency to rise up in remorse and throw out whoever’s been in.
Except — whoops — the Republicans have assembled a trove of truly terrible candidates. You’d almost think the party honchos met in secret and decided that running the Senate was too much of a pain, and that they needed to gather some nominees who would guarantee they could keep lazing around in the minority.
I know you know that we have to begin this discussion with Herschel Walker.
A few days ago, Georgia looked like a prime possibility for a turnover. It tilts strongly toward the G.O.P., and Walker seemed like your normal Republican candidate by 2022 standards — terrible, yeah, but with some political pluses. His autobiography vividly described a spectacular rise to sports, school and business success after a childhood in which “I was an outcast, a stuttering-stumpy-fat-poor-other-side-of-the-railroad-tracks-living-stupid-country boy.”
On the minus side, Walker was a tad, well, fictional on points ranging from his academic and business achievements to the number of his children.
Walker also has a very angry and social media-skilled son who describes him as a terrible father to four kids by four different women, who “wasn’t in the house raising one of them.”
Plus, Walker seems totally out to lunch when it comes to … issue stuff. He attacked Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act with its emphasis on halting global warming, as did many, many conservatives. But I’m pretty sure Walker was the only one who argued that “we have enough trees.”
So maybe not a perfect pick for a candidate to run against incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock, a longtime public speaker, community activist and pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s old church. But hey, Walker was a really good football player! And a Donald Trump fave!
As the whole world now knows, The Daily Beast reported that one of Walker’s ex-girlfriends says that he’d paid for her to have an abortion, producing the check for $700 along with … a get-well card.
Rather problematic for a candidate who calls for a “no exceptions” abortion ban. Walker denied the whole thing, except the hard-to-ignore check. “I send money to a lot of people,” he told Fox News. As only he can.
Walker isn’t the only awful candidate the Republicans are fielding in critical races. In New Hampshire, a Democratic senator, Maggie Hassan, is running for re-election to a seat she won by only about 1,000 votes last time around.
The Republicans had it made. All the party had to do was avoid nominating somebody off the wall, like Don Bolduc, a retired general who the Republican governor, Chris Sununu, called a “conspiracy-theory extremist.”
Surprise! Bolduc won the primary. And the way he’s handling his victory makes you think he was as shocked as the party leaders. From the beginning of his campaign, he’d told voters that he was positive Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election. In August, he was assuring them, “I’m not switching horses, baby.” Then, after he got the nomination in September, he, um, wavered. (“What I can say is that we have irregularity.”)
This is the same guy who vowed to “always fight” for the life-begins-at-conception principle. But we live now in a political world where Republicans are discovering, to their shock, that people don’t want to be told what to do about their reproduction choices. Bolduc is now rejecting Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks. (“Doesn’t make sense.”)
In the Republican search for terrible candidates for winnable races, we can’t overlook Arizona. It’s a very tough state for Democrats. The incumbent, Mark Kelly, won the seat after John McCain’s death with the power of his story — an astronaut who took his wife’s place as family politician after she was shot in the head while meeting with constituents. Many of his supporters feared he’d be doomed to defeat in a year like 2022.
Enter Blake Masters, the Trump-backed Republican nominee who appeared in one early campaign ad toting a short-barreled rifle that he kinda boasted was designed not for hunting but “to kill people.”
Masters, a venture capitalist, rose into political prominence with the enthusiastic backing of Peter Thiel, billionaire megadonor. You certainly cannot dismiss a candidate with that kind of money, even if he does have a history of blaming gun violence on “Black people, frankly” and making a video while dressed in war paint in which he makes fun of people who worry about “cultural insensitivity.”
Lots to look out for, particularly if you’re not interested in baseball playoffs or another “Halloween” movie in which Jamie Lee Curtis does battle with Michael Myers. Hey, you don’t need to go to a movie theater to be horrified. Just think what the Senate would be like if these guys win.
The upcoming elections remind me watching a game of tennis, or ping pong … back, forth, left, right, back, forth. Round and round she goes, where she lands no one knows. To say that it is stressful is an understatement! Frank Bruni’s latest column sums it all up fairly nicely …
Live By the Trump, Die By the Trump
By Frank Bruni
8 September 2022
Democrats were doomed. We prediction-mad pundits felt predictable certainty about that. The recent history of midterm elections augured disaster for the party in power. Inflation would make the damage that much worse.
So why are Republicans sweating?
Their overreach on abortion and the subsequent mobilization of women voters explain a great deal but not everything. There’s another prominent plotline. Its protagonist is Donald Trump. And its possible moral is a sweet and overdue pileup of clichés — about reaping what you sow, paying the piper, lying in the bed you’ve made.
Republicans chose to kneel before him. Will he now bring them to their knees?
Thanks in large part to Trump, they’re stuck with Senate candidates — Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona — whose ineptness, inanity, immoderation or all three significantly diminish their chances in purple states at a propitious juncture.
Thanks in even larger part to Trump, voters ranked threats to democracy as the most pressing problem facing the country in a recent NBC News poll. That intensifying concern is among the reasons that President Biden went so big and bold last week in his intensely debated speech about extremism in America. He was eyeing the midterms, and he was wagering that Republican leaders’ indulgence of Trump’s foul play and fairy tales might finally cost them.
Trump is also a factor in Republicans’ vulnerability regarding abortion rights. For his own selfish political purposes, he made grand anti-abortion promises. He appointed decidedly anti-abortion judges, including three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. He as much as anyone fired up the anti-abortion movement to the point where Republicans may now get burned.
With two months until Election Day, Republicans want to focus voters’ attention on unaffordable housing, exorbitant grocery bills and the generally high cost of living. They want to instill deeper and broader fear about immigration and crime. They want to portray Democrats as the enemies of the American way.
But that’s more than a little tricky when Trump had America’s secrets strewn throughout the bowels of Mar-a-Loco. When his excuses for mishandling those classified documents change at a dizzying clip, contradict previous ones and often boil down to his typical infantile formula of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I. When he uses Truth Social, the media penal colony to which Twitter and Facebook sentenced him, for all the old falsehoods plus new ones. When criminal charges against him aren’t out of the question.
The progressive excesses of some Democrats pale beside the madness of this would-be monarch.
Democrats could still have a bad, even brutal, November. That is indeed how the pendulum historically swings, and two months is plenty of time for political dynamics to change yet again. Biden could overplay his hand, a possibility suggested by that speech.
But for the moment, Republicans are spooked. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, has decided to try to recapture the party’s long-ago Contract-With-America magic by detailing a “Commitment to America” that will no doubt omit what should be the most important commitment of all — to the truth. It also won’t erase the fact that 196 of the 529 Republican nominees running for the House, the Senate, governor, attorney general or secretary had “fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election,” according to a chilling FiveThirtyEight analysis of the party’s nominees as of Wednesday.
That morally corrupt position was probably a political asset in their primaries, just as having Trump’s endorsement usually was. But in the general election? As Republican nominees pivot toward that, at least a few of them are realizing that it’s a different ballgame — and that Trump is trouble. They’re taking baby steps away from the world’s biggest baby.
Good luck with that. He’ll never let them go, never muffle himself long enough or behave well enough for there to be a Republican narrative that doesn’t revolve around him. That was clear to Republicans from the start. To hang with him is to hang with him.
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.
My blogging buddy Jeff over at On the Fence Voters has found some things to be optimistic about and I like the way he thinks. We all need to remember that amidst the dark terrain of today’s political landscape, things ARE getting done, there IS hope for our future. Thank you, Jeff … I think we all need to remember that we have a president who cares about ALL the people, not only those with money to burn!
Contrary to my pessimism about the midterms post a while back, my attitude is beginning to change. Things are getting better in the United States of America, and we have President Joe Biden and the Democrats to thank for that.
Meanwhile, the corrupt former president awaits his fate from many investigations and probes, and his sycophantic friends in the GOP proudly stand by him. This fact reflects the stark contrast between our two political parties. One party is working for the American people—the other works for one man and a deranged group of his cult followers.
To be sure, you may not like everything Joe Biden and the Democrats are doing. Some might not think the recently passed legislation, The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), goes far enough. Perhaps you believe centrist Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema played too significant a role and whittled down the bill to something far…
Could you use a little ray of hope for the upcoming November mid-term elections? I think we all could. Dan Pfeiffer was a senior advisor to President Barack Obama for a number of years, and is the author of three books about politics in this new, uncharted “Maga Era”. His newsletter on Substack is called The Message Box and today’s was an astute assessment of why there is hope for the Democratic Party to maintain a majority in the House and Senate after the mid-terms. Read on …
Why Dems Could Win This Fall
An uncharacteristically optimistic take on how recent events have upended the midterms
Dan Pfeiffer
Optimism does not come naturally to me. If I had a family crest, “Prepare for the worst, be surprised by the best” would be the motto emblazoned on it. I have tried to avoid telling people what they want to hear about a high stakes midterm election in this absolutely miserable political environment. Up until recently, Democrats were stuck in a doom loop.. That defeatism threatened to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What activist, donor, or voter wants to sign up for a suicide mission? And to be honest, it’s been hard to make a reasonable, fact-based case that Democrats could upend the historical trends. However, over the last few weeks, the worm has turned. Democrats now have a legitimate shot to outpace expectations dramatically.
I am not devolving into a sunny guy. This is not a prediction. It is not an admonition against bedwetting. I think the odds are still against Democrats. We have an eternity till Election Day. The future looked quite dire three weeks ago, and may look just as dire in three weeks. But as we sit here today, one can make a credible bull case for Democrats.
Reason 1 for Optimism: Success
All political analysis should begin with the fact that America has a growing, diverse, pro-truth, pro-democracy, anti-MAGA majority. Now, of course, this majority is not evenly distributed geographically, which is why the GOP often has an advantage in the Senate and Electoral College. But the bulk of the races this cycle will be conducted in states Joe Biden won in 2020. Simply reconstructing the Biden coalition in composition and turnout will be sufficient to win. Our major problem to date has been disillusion and disappointment among our base and the Independent voters who favor Biden. Less than a month ago, Democrats seemed headed for a legislative disaster. During this period, Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine:
By realistic or even minimal standards of performance, this two-year term, almost certain to be the last period of Democratic-controlled government for the foreseeable future, has been a failure. The ramifications of this defeat — political, economic, and ecological — will reverberate.
And then everything changed.
In rapid succession, Democrats passed legislation on guns, microchips, veterans’ benefits, and the historic Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats now have reasons to be happy, and Independents have reasons to reconsider supporting Republicans. More specifically, the climate change provisions are an opportunity to re-engage young voters. Last week, after the Manchin-Schumer deal was announced, I wrote:
No group of our core Democratic constituency has become more disillusioned or disengaged than younger voters. Passing the most ambitious climate change bill in history creates an opportunity to re-engage this group. People won’t vote this time if they think their last vote didn’t matter. Passing a serious climate change package is proof that every door knocked, text sent, and vote cast in 2020 mattered a whole helluva lot.
Democrats now have a powerful case to convince their voters to keep them in the majority.
Reason 2: Improving Political Environment
Despite this newsletter and other strategy, tactics, and message-focused sources, the biggest factors in political success are often far outside the control of the candidates and campaign operatives. The driving force in this election is inflation — and specifically, the price of gas and groceries. In most polling, 80 to 90 percent of voters listed inflation as a top concern. Most gave Biden (and Democrats more broadly) abysmal marks for their handling of the issue. As gas prices went up, President Biden’s approval rating went down. While the near-term picture on inflation is cloudy, gas prices have been steadily declining for more than a month.
Costs are still elevated, and families still feel financial pressure, but the trajectory is good. The Biden Administration continues their valiant efforts to focus the public’s attention on the steady decline. Voters are historically forward-looking. They are willing to give politicians credit for progress even if the present is still suboptimal. If gas prices continue to drop, it’s more likely that the electorate will give the Democrats credit for the historic number of jobs created since Biden took office.
Reason 3: Backlash Towards GOP Policies
Presidents usually get shellacked in their first midterm. Reagan, Bush #41, Clinton, Obama, and Trump all lost many seats. The primary theory for this occurrence is called the “Thermostatic Model,” which Andrew Prokop described in Vox as follows:
This theory holds that the public functions essentially like a thermostat, kicking in when it’s either too hot or too cold to restore the preferred temperature. Voters could conclude things are too conservative under a Republican regime and elect a new Democratic president. But then they could quickly conclude things have become too liberal, and swing back toward Republicans in the midterms. Then after Republicans regain some power, perhaps opinion will swing back toward Democrats and get the president reelected. (The Obama and Clinton presidencies both followed this trajectory.)
Under this theory, the Republican Wave of 2010 was a response to large-scale Obama initiatives like the stimulus plan and Obamacare. Both of these bills were underwater in the Fall of 2010. Obama’s numbers bounced back when the public saw the dangerous extremism of the new Republican majority.
Like every other recent president, Joe Biden’s numbers took a big hit. His approval rating is now at or below where Donald Trump’s was at the same time. This is not great. Trump is sort of the “Mendoza Line” for Presidents. What’s unique about Biden’s political challenges is that they are not a response to his policy agenda. Every one of his major initiatives was popular when it passed and remains so today. The initial polling on the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS bills show broad, bipartisan support. To the extent policy backlash exists in this election, it’s a response to the extremist policy agenda of MAGA Republicans embodied by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dobbs case. A Supreme Court rigged by Republicans ripping a constitutional right from millions of Americans combined with a series of Orwellian Republican laws like book bans have put the GOP on defense. The public is concerned about overreach from Republicans, not Democrats. We saw the power of abortion as an issue in the recent Kansas referendum. The anti-abortion side lost by double digits in a state Trump won by 15 points. Most notably, 100,000 Independents who could not vote in the party primaries turned out to vote on the abortion initiative.
Reason 4: Candidate Quality
With the help of Donald Trump, Republicans nominated a uniquely vulnerable slate of candidates. This group of criminal, incompetent carnival barkers give Democrats a slight advantage in states they would lose under more normal circumstances. The Republican gubernatorial nominees in Pennsylvania and Michigan were active parts of the insurrection. The Republican nominee for Attorney General in Arizona is an actual member of the Oath Keepers — a Right Wing terror group. Herschel Walker’s Georgia Senate campaign has been one disaster after another. This recent (and devastating) ad shows Walker’s unique vulnerability:
NEW ad running in Georgia from Republican Accountability PAC.
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) August 8, 2022
Dr. Oz has flopped so badly that the Republican Party is exploring ways to replace him on the Pennsylvania ballot. J.D. Vance in Ohio is such an obvious fraud that he is in danger of losing Ohio — a state Trump won by more than 10 points twice. I could go on and on, but you get the point. Being a great candidate is rarely enough to win in a tough year, but a bad candidate can lose in the best year.
So You’re Saying There’s a Chance…?
Look, we have miles to travel between now and Election Day. The political environment changed dramatically once and could change again. To that point, the FBI raided Mar-A-Lago in the three hours since I finished the last draft of this piece.
If gas prices tick back up or President Biden’s approval ratings don’t rise with his fortunes, Dems could still be in heaps of trouble. The House is A LOT tougher than the Senate, but this election is now winnable if, and only if, we all dig in and double down on the hard work that delivered us the House, Senate, and White House in the last two elections.
Herschel Walker Is A Messy Candidate, But The Georgia Senate Race Is Still A Toss-Up
Say WHAT??? How? I wrote about Walker not long ago. This is the ‘man’ who lied about having been in the FBI, who sired three children out of wedlock by different women … children he does not support. This is the ‘man’ who supports the Big Lie and has promoted other conspiracy theories, who put a gun to his ex-wife’s head and threatened to “blow [her] f*ing brains out”, and who chased a delivery person with a gun for being late. And this is the ‘man’ whose view of climate change is …
“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 we to clean that back up.”
This is a college-drop-out’s view of environmental science … stunning, isn’t it?
Simply the fact that he is even allowed to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate is mind-boggling, but the fact that he is running only slightly behind the far more intelligent, more competent incumbent, Ralph Warnock, begs the question: what the heck are they smoking down in Georgia??? Remember they are also the ones who sent Margie Greene to the House of Representatives in 2020! I repeat … what are they smoking???
In the RCP average of polls, Warnock is leading Walker by 2.8 percentage points … too close for comfort. Warnock has been in the Senate for nigh on two years now and has proven himself to be competent, honest, and a man of good conscience. He co-sponsored a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15, and supports the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. He is pro-choice, opposes the death penalty, is pro voting rights, is pro LGBTQ rights, and has received a grade of ‘F’ from the National Rifle Association (NRA). All of which earns him a big thumbs-up in my book.
And yet, some Georgians would prefer a liar, a cheater, and a wife abuser to represent them in the Senate? Where’s the logic???
One analysis I read claims that part of Walker’s appeal is his ‘status’ as a football player. Excuse me, people, but the United States Congress is a far cry from a football field! I can cook a great Jambalaya, but that doesn’t qualify me for a seat in the Senate!!!
And another part of Walker’s potential success is simply partisanship. Georgia went from red to blue in 2020, but with President Biden’s approval ratings not-so-good right now, it may be leaning back toward the right. As one analyst said …
“There are X number of people where it doesn’t matter, they’re just going to pull the R lever.”
I’ll never forget when I was in my early 20s, newly married and living in Virginia, near the Tennessee border. A neighbor told me that …
“My daddy was a Republican, his daddy before him was a Republican, and by god I’m gonna die a Republican too. I’ll never vote for a damn Democrat!”
That, my friends, is a mentality that is almost impossible to reason with, to appeal to with logic. Let us hope, fingers crossed, that Senator Ralph Warnock can retain his seat in November, because I really, really don’t want somebody sitting in the Senate who points a gun at his own wife, who believes that our “good air” went to China, and who lies more than he tells the truth. C’mon, Georgians … clear your heads of whatever it is you’re smoking and wake up!
I have an idea! Congress should pass legislation that each state can only send one nutjob to Congress in any given year! It’s not fair to the nation for a state to send both a Greene and a Walker at the same time! We deserve better!
By John Buss
By Pat Bagley
Filosofa's Word 