Herschel, We Hardly Knew You.
Yeah, I know all the bad things about Herschel Walker. He was a violent, dishonest, unintelligent man who knew damned well he had no business in the Senate, and was willing to collaborate with the worst sort of racists to get something he didn't deserve. The whole nation dodged a bullet when the Republican party fell just short of finding enough malicious, hate filled honkies in Georgia to put him in the Senate. And yet, as soon as he conceded, I found myself feeling what I never expected to: sympathy for this poor guy, who was mesmerized by the Republicans, and Trump in particular, into serving as their unwitting tool.
This is a guy who never had any political experience or, apparently, interest, and let's face it: he was not intelligent or informed enough to understand how he was being used. He was induced to put a black face on the worst outbreak of white race hatred this country has known since the Civil War. In the prospect, he has had his life damaged forever. Instead of living out whatever years are left to him by the brain damage which he almost certainly has from his sports career, as an honored football hero, he has been reduced to a buffoon, a person who will always be remembered as a fool and a willing collaborator with people who would have treated him as little more than an animal if he had won that Senate seat.
Yeah, Lindsay Graham, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz and dozens more took their thirty pieces of silver from Trump, and ended up being social pariahs with destroyed reputations and terminated career prospects. But they were all people with long records of willing servitude to the worst elements of our political society. They knew exactly what they were doing; they just thought they would never have to pay a price for their treachery. Herschel Walker is different. He is, I believe, a man who had no idea what he was getting into, and he was destroyed by people that sung him a siren song that he could not resist. In the end, he is a victim of the Republicans, and I feel sorry for him. He didn't deserve this fate the way that all the others who fell in line behind Trump did.
Live in peace, Herschel, while I at least will turn my anger back toward the miserable, corrupt criminals who deserve it.
Comments
Firstly, I got the impression that was HIM talking, not his speechwriters. And it was classy and respectful towards both his supporters and the system.
Secondly, if he'd spoken like that for the entire campaign, I can't help thinking he would now be Senator-elect Walker.
"If I can't be a Senator, I'm going back to my second ambition, and will become a werewolf. So, Reverend Warnock, if you ever run into me again, and it's the full moon, I'd run away as fast as you can."
I am a sometime resident of Georgia too, having worked on several movies there. I sympathize with how you feel- the guy is a violent abuser who moreover suffers from a serious, uncurable mental illness which alone should render him absolutely ineligible for any position of responsibility; in addition the 90%+ likelihood that he suffers from CTI means his behavior is only likely to deteriorate significantly over the years he would be in the Senate. Still, I guess my point is that it is futile for us to direct our anger toward Walker, who is gone now as a political force, instead of toward the evil, corrupt Republican political machine that promoted him and will easily replace him with hundreds of others who are just as bad. It is the Republican party that we must work to destroy, not this particular spent example of their maliciousness.
But some slight pity didn't keep me from werewolf bashing. Wit:
"OH, I thought GOP was selling a chocolate bar. Some days he was a nut; some days he wasnt."