At Long Last, Let's Call This What It Is

Recent revelations regarding Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz are disturbing, but by no means do mean the contests are won. The GOP does not care about anything but power

Roger Sollenberger’s blockbuster report at The Daily Beast that Georgia senate candidate Herschel Walker paid for a woman’s abortion in 2009 is yet another installment in a long, long dive into Walker’s personal dealings. That beat has produced a treasure trove of controversies and scandals, including a litany of lies and misleading statements, ranging from his involvement with law enforcement, his businesses, and secret children.

Relatively speaking, it should be enough to sink Walker’s campaign. We all should have woken up this morning to news that he has withdrawn from the race and that the GOP has replaced him with Gary Black, the Agriculture Commissioner who competed with Walker for the nomination. That, in due time, would lead to an overwhelming victory for incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock and some necessary soul-searching on the Republican side.

We know this isn’t true. And we should stop expecting it to happen.

Walker’s candidacy has been an embarrassment from the get-go, including his lack of talent or even interest. His noted history of grotesque domestic violence and admitted desire to literally kill another human being should have sealed the deal.

And yet, none of it matters to the Republican electorate.

He very well might lose. The trends in this race show a distinct possibility that Georgians will split their ballots and re-elect both Warnock and Republican governor Brian Kemp. But the senate race will probably remain close.

Similarly, in Pennsylvania, television host Mehmet Oz continues to hang around in his race despite daily evidence that he isn’t up to the job or, like Walker, very interested in it anyway. If all of that wasn’t enough, it’s now been revealed that, on top of dispensing dangerous pseudo-medical advice for profit, Oz has been personally involved in killing hundreds of dogs. Hundreds.

And, again, Oz could very well lose his race. And maybe he won’t. But these revelations, in both races, show something it’s time we took to heart.

The Republican Party simply does not care about its so-called “principles.”

It is not pro-life beyond a desire to control women.

It is not “fiscally-conservative” unless the opposition party is in charge and it desires to undermine its entire agenda. Otherwise, the Republican Party has run up record deficits everytime it has power.

It is not a party of “traditional values” because, literally, there is no such thing. “Traditional values” is a strategist and poll-tested phrase used to attack communities and individuals and cultural trends they find reprehensible and in need of oppression.

After all of this time, after Donald Trump, after Mitch McConnell’s entire history, after one notable and irrefutable example, it’s time we move beyond this simplistic and misleading understanding of politics altogether and lose our ability to be surprised by any of this.

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The example of Donald Trump is perhaps too easy. After all, the GOP is attempting to blame literally every one of their problems on the former president in an effort to rehabilitate the party and “move beyond” his influence. And, in the cases of Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, and others, even Mitch McConnell is tacitly fine with losing many of the races in November in hopes of “burning off the fever” they believe the GOP shake and leave behind.

But this is about more than Trump because he is merely a symptom of a larger disease. The GOP has, for decades, tried desperately to maintain a veneer of conservative respectability while fostering antidemocratic, conspiratorial energies. To that end, the principles above have never mattered. They are cudgels. Time-tested, strategist-designed weapons that have, in one race after another, launched faulty and hypocritical candidates into power.

And why? Because what matters is control. And wealth. And, ultimately, power itself.

Even now, there are people still attempting to defeat the GOP by highlighting this hypocrisy as if the mask hasn’t already slipped and the game hasn’t become obvious. Simply pointing out where their “principles” and actions diverse does nothing. It only showcases that the GOP is playing a completely different game and understands, intuitively and importantly, that much of politics is simply toeing a desire line while operating according to an agenda obsessed with power and power alone.

A more important example is Roy Moore, a disgraced former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. After winning the Republican nomination for a special senate election in 2017, Moore was peppered with reports that he had sexually assaulted multiple women, some of them minors, as well as allegations that he had pursued several underage girls. Briefly the Republican Party called on him to withdraw and even pulled some of his resources, but Trump’s support proved the difference maker and those resources were returned just in time for the final push.

Memory of this election is skewed now. It feels as if his disastrous candidacy led to a landslide defeat.

In reality, Democrat Doug Jones defeated Moore 49% to 48%.

The difference was roughly twenty thousand votes.

Trump’s appeal was telling. Rather than dressing up Moore as a perfect man or even reasonable candidate, he prefaced the need in necessity. A vote for Doug Jones, he told supporters, was a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and a vote for disaster. It was an emergency situation and pulling the lever for Moore was a moral concession.

And why did Trump make this appeal?

Because it was the same one that got him elected.

We have crossed a line with the Republican Party that might never be uncrossed, which is why I maintain this is a political project that has reached its end and must turn into something else. The fearmongering has rendered a completely unescapable nightmare reality in which only the cruelest, most disgusting candidates can emerge, and the moral compromise that gave us Trump and Moore and now Walker and Oz will only continue to produce worse and worse candidates.

And yes, remember that.

There are worse candidates to come. Worse than all of them.