I've never seen a grift given away quite as blatantly as it was by right-wing talk thing Dana Loesch (motto: "I was too fucking crazy for the NRA"). In talking about the revelation that ultra-anti-abortion Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, running against incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, paid for a girlfriend's abortion, Loesch started with "What I’m about to say is in no means a contradiction or a compromise of a principle," which automatically means "I'm throwing my principles out the window faster than a priest at Disney World." Then she just fucking said it, the thing we all knew was true but that none of them had the guts to just let everyone know: "I am concerned about one thing, and one thing only at this point. So, I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate."
And there you go. Loesch has previously and repeatedly called abortion "infanticide." Or, you know, "baby murder." So, by that logic, within the rhetoric of the anti-abortion right, Herschel Walker is like someone who has paid a hitman to off someone, which is, you know, a crime. But Loesch is way cool with Walker conspiring to murder a baby as long as he might get elected and vote to stop more abortions. Or, as Loesch put it, "If the Daily Beast story is true, you’re telling me Walker used his money to reportedly pay some skank for an abortion and Warnock wants to use all of our monies to pay a whole bunch of skanks for abortions." In other words, abortion isn't the serious crime they keep saying it is. I mean, you're pretty much saying, "Hey, I'd elect Son of Sam if he promised to stop more serial killers. He only murdered 6 people."
If she had an ethical bone in her body (spoiler alert: she does not), if anyone in the GOP had an ethical bone in their body (spoiler alert: they do not), they would say that it's time for Walker to step aside and regroup, awaiting someone who isn't a goddamn brain-damaged, violent, misogynistic lunatic who paid for at least one abortion (because there really might be more than one). Of course, that's not what they're doing. They got their concussed Black candidate to run against the genuinely decent and genuinely progressive Raphael Warnock.
Frankly, the exploitation of obviously mentally-unwell ex-football player Walker is downright disgusting. I'd pity Walker if I thought he was capable of change, if I thought he might have a moment of self-reflection and wonder, "What the fuck am I doing?" Instead, every bug in Walker's brain becomes a feature or another bunch of dust to be swept under the very lumpy carpet. Walker has threatened to kill his ex-wife and his grown son. He lied about the number of children he had, leaving off the ones he had abandoned, all while condemning the Black community because of the number of "fatherless" kids. And he's said bizarre, moronic, and downright incomprehensible things on the campaign trail, all with the same placid smile that says, "I don't fully grasp the meaning of what I'm doing, but I sure like the attention." Running him as a candidate is one of the most cynical things the GOP has done this election cycle. As Elie Mystal has put it, "Republicans have rallied around him because they think Black Georgians are just addled enough to vote for touchdowns over basic public competence." Spoiler: They're not.
I get the notion of tolerating the sins of your candidates. No one is perfect. But when a politician does literally the opposite of what they claim they believe and what they claim you believe, it's beyond hypocrisy, a word that has no meaning anymore for Republicans, and into flat out lying. But, as we know with Trump, lying doesn't matter. Living in an alternate reality doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Hell, it doesn't matter that Walker can go on lipless fuck Hugh Hewitt's show and say about paying for the abortion, which he denies doing, "Had that happened, I would have said it, because it’s nothing to be ashamed of there." What the fuck does that mean? The very party he's part of wants to criminalize his behavior. In Texas, Walker would have a bounty on his head for doing it. Not feeling shame would seem to make the whole thing worse.
But Walker is forgiven because of the deep desire for more power. That shit means more than anything. Hell, it's why fundamentalist Christian nutzoids put aside their beliefs because Walker is a meat puppet for the radical right and will get more judges in place in a GOP majority Senate. Oh, and Walker has given the all-purpose out: he's proclaimed his love for Jesus. "I was forgiven, the Lord has forgiven me," Walker said. He didn't explain how the fuck he figured out he was forgiven of his sins by an invisible sky wizard, so I'm gonna go with "Made that shit up like every born again asshole." Seriously, unless you get a fucking letter in fire or some shit, don't tell me you know what your god says about you. But the MAGA Christians are all in on Walker and don't give a shit that Warnock is an actual, you know, reverend. Whatever God says, they've forgiven him for paying for (at least one) abortion and I'm sure they'll forgive him for all the lies he's telling now.
The GOP simply doesn't give a shit about how shitty Walker is. They'll put up with anything. He could fuck a donkey while shoving a crucifix up his ass, and they'll say, "Well, at least he'll vote for tax cuts for the wealthy and for judges who will end birth control and gay marriage." His son Christian, who is ultra-conservative himself, could put out a video showing Walker beating a baby to death, and good church people would say, "Herschel gets a pass on baby murder because he'll definitely stop others from murdering babies, no matter how many babies he murders, even if that's a lot of babies."
It's nihilism. It's exploitation. It's horrendous and pathetic. It's everything that Republicans are right now. They couldn't give a dry rat shit about what we think about their hypocrisy and mendaciousness. They will damn their souls gleefully to bring damnation to the rest of us. And the repulsive fuckstains who make up their base will gobble it up like shit from Jesus's ass. None of them care.
And that fucks us on the left because we actually do give a fuck. We lose power because we give a shit who is in power. That shouldn't be a quaint notion, but it's getting goddamn hard not to debase ourselves just to keep up.
