SAY WHAT? - Oh look. Another woman has come forward - on-camera - to accuse serial fabulist, "warrior for God," and purported-when-politically-convenient "pro-lifer" Herschel Walker of coercing her to have an abortion, thus bringing his current number of (known) lies about his schooling, business, children and intrepid service on Paw Patrol to...8,472, we think. The vital, potentially Senate-flipping race for Georgia's Senate seat remains (WTF) too close to call. But Walker has pulled slightly ahead, never mind he's an incoherent, ignorant clown who embodies everything the party of alleged family values decries: He has an unseemly history of violent criminal behavior, he had often-abusive relationships with multiple women, he abandoned multiple children whose existence he tried to hide even as he preached about the evil of absentee Black fathers, and now he's apparently helped, per the GOP's fanatical, perfidious world view, murder at least two more of his children while persistently lying about it. He's also a longtime friggin' Texas resident, recruited by the GOP mostly for his deep tan; still, he told Fox News, he "always thought about Georgia," so there's that. Good thing the GOP is so laser-focused on preserving the patriarchal order, and they have no shame.
Walker has been running an aggressively "pro-life" campaign, repeatedly likening abortion to murder, expressing simple-minded enthusiasm for a national ban with no exceptions, loudly declaring himself "a Christian who supports all life," and chastising the good Senator and Reverend Raphael Warnock in their only debate with, "Instead of aborting those babies, why aren't you baptizing those babies?" His grotesque, bullshit abortion-is-murder schtick has been so prevalent, in fact, it felt like inevitable poetic justice when he recently got pranked at a Macon rally by Jason Selvic of The Good Liars, who blithely leapt on stage and tried to hand the serial philanderer - and his security detail - a roll of condoms. No audio was released from their encounter - we wish - but Walker evidently wasn't the only one unhappy with the caper: Selvig fans worried how many criminals were getting away "while Herschel blows off his patrol for this speech," and The Liars posted that, "Unfortunately, when Jason left he found out he was pregnant with Herschel's 7th unannounced child."
Last month, The Daily Beast reported on a woman who said she'd been pressured by Walker to have an abortion, and she had receipts; he said he had no idea who she was, which was weird when it turned out she'd had a child with him and took him to court for child support. Tuesday, a second woman appeared in an emotional interview with ABC News to say Walker had compelled her, too, to get an abortion in 1993 during their years-long affair while he was married to his first wife. (We think the one whose head he put a gun to, or was it the one whose brains he threatened to blow out?) "He was very clear he did not want me to have the child," tearfully recalled the unnamed woman, an Independent who voted for Trump. "He said that because of his wife's family and powerful people around him, I would not be safe and the child would not be safe." And yes, she agreed, it was "menacing...I felt threatened, and I thought I had no choice." She described the time in painful detail, saying it felt "very shameful" and "I felt I'd been manipulated." She'd come forward because she believes "he isn't fit to be a U.S. Senator...I think honesty matters."
Walker blustered and prevaricated when she first spoke up last week, dismissing the allegation as "foolishness, and I will not entertain any of it." "That's a lie," he said. "I hope people can see right now that Raphael Warnock and the Left would do whatever they can to win the seat...and they want me to play these guessing games, but I'm not." He is, however, playing defense these days, and it's not just women and children emerging from the woodwork to expose his damaged past. His brazen hypocrisy on abortion is one thing; his staggering doltishness, ineptitude, vacuity, the endless, unintelligible jabbering of an imbecile clearly not up to the task spuriously propped up before him is another. Critics are finally calling out not just the elephant in the room, but the village idiot blithering in their midst. Even the gentle, eloquent Warnock - "A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire, for ourselves and for our children" - has taken off the gloves: To Walker's witless "they just need to eat right" on the issue of soaring insulin prices in a state with a huge diabetic population, he retorted, "You actually have to know stuff to do this job."
An always-smooth Obama has also made a few campaign appearances, and yes he was weak and deeply flawed but Lord, what a falling-off is there to the dunderheaded Walker. Obama's gone easy on the idiocy - no angry Black man here - offering a "thought experiment" of someone in an airport thinking, hey, let's have him fly the plane. "There is very little evidence that he has bothered to learn anything (about) public service," he said of Walker. "Seems to me he's a celebrity who wants to be a politician, and we've seen how that goes." "I'm not a pilot," Walker indignantly sputtered. "I'm a football player, I'm a politican, I'm a lover, I'm that warrior for God he should have been" - just what we need as we topple into a hellscape of Christian nationalism. Then he just babbled: "Why am I talking about him, he's not even running, he got to go back to wherever he live at, where he live at I don't even know, but it's a big house." Actually, it's all pretty much babbling, from his war on pronouns - "What the heck is a pronoun, i tell ya my pronouns are sick and tired of these pronouns 'cause these pronouns are gonna get our men and women in the service killed" - to his singular, spectacular, "Do you look like we got peanuts on the brain?"
As Walker inched into a slight, horrifying lead, the most blistering takedown came from Black megachurch pastor Dr. Jamal Bryant, who began a fiery, now-viral Sunday sermon at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church by warning rowdy congregants, "Y'all ain't ready for me today." Skipping the lies, violence, abortions, idiocy, he lit into an opportunistic GOP's manipulation of race and politics in "the post-antebellum South" - how the GOP "moved" Walker from Texas to Georgia because "some principalities" felt change was happening too fast with a Black and a Jew flipping the state blue, and, "They thought we were so slow, so stupid, that we would elect the lowest caricature of a stereotypical broken Black man as opposed to someone who is educated and erudite." Since Walker was 16, he said, "White men been telling him what to do, what school to go to, where to live, where to pay for abortions...You think they not gon' tell him how to vote?" "Georgia," he finally declared, "I need you to know, the slave Negro y'all are used to don't live here no more. We can think for ourselves (and) vote for ourselves." Damn, we hope so. Georgia, please, please vote.
(Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: [email protected])
