Character No Longer Matters

For Republicans, it's all about party, and winning at the cost of decency, honesty, and democracy.

Recall the terrific scene in Casablanca where the police inspector, played memorably by Claude Reins, attempts to display his moral rectitude for a visiting Nazi SS officer by feigning shock that there is gambling going on at Rick’s American Café, just as his lieutenant hands him a fistful of cash and says, “Your winnings, sir.”

Art imitates life, and sometimes life imitates art. That’s where we are today as the entire Republican establishment is much more interested in winning that Georgia Senate seat than they are in their much-promoted moralizing about abortion.

As we learned in 2016, there’s a new playbook in politics. Ethical standing no longer counts. When accused, especially when obviously guilty, deny and stonewall. Is your own voice on that Access Hollywood tape aggrandizing sexual assault? Deny it. did you instigate a violent insurrection at the US Capitol? Deny it. Did you spend a year and a half hiding top secret documents from the National Archives, first ignoring a polite ask, and then ignoring a subpoena? Deny it.

And while you’re at it, be sure to accuse political opponents of the very things you’re guilty of. Remember, there is no longer a place in Republican politics for a loyal opposition; there are only friends and enemies.

Just as none of the Trump peccadilloes damaged his political career, Walker won’t be damaged for funding one abortion, or trying to fund a second with the same woman, who carried that pregnancy to term, and is now raising their ten year old son on her own, as Herschel doubles down on the lie that he’s never met her. His demonstrable lack of qualifications and character for high office are meaningless. As are the restraining order for threatening the life of his then-current wife, his multiple failed businesses, his lies about graduating from the University of Georgia, and about being an FBI agent. None of it matters. It’s all about—and only about— party.

The headline in the Atlanta Journal Constitution says it all: “Christian leaders rally around embattled Herschel Walker.” Morality, like ethics, is now trumped by party politics. (Pun intended.) All that matters is party, party, party, or as former Breitbart writer and right wing pundit, Dana Loesch, made clear: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles,” she said. “I want control of the Senate.”

But Walker’s twenty-three year old son, un-ironically named Christian, himself a conservative warrior with a substantial online following, called out his father for his “phony faith.” He went to social media to detail the abuse he said he and his mother suffered because of Walker. “How DARE YOU LIE and act as though you’re some ‘moral, Christian, upright man,’ the younger Walker wrote on Twitter. “You’ve lived a life of DESTROYING other people’s lives. How dare you.

“I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us,” he wrote. “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.”

The AJC: “The younger Walker wrote that every member of his father’s family had asked him not to run because they knew at least some of his past, but Walker ran anyway.

“After a campaign of embellishments, brags, half-truths and outright lies from Walker, the messages from Christian Walker, especially a video posted Tuesday morning, have the painful ring of truth.”

Online maestro, Dave Pell, riffing on the infamous statement by Donald Trump, says, “Herschel Walker could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and impregnate somebody, wait a few weeks, and then personally abort the baby, and he wouldn't lose voters.”

And when the liars and insurrectionists do get caught up in the legal system, all of their brave theories of conspiracies to overturn a legitimate election evaporate in a cloud of Fifth Amendment claims. It’s not like they don’t know their words and deeds are immoral, unethical and illegal, they don’t care, they just don’t want to be held responsible.

Speaking of denial, according to the Washington Post, a majority of GOP nominees — 299 in all — deny the 2020 election results. It is apparently the new price of admission if you want party support. The Atlantic calls this “the new law of politics.”

The weirdest thing is, Americans know it. The recent New York Times/ASTENARI/Siena College Research Institute poll shows that 54% of Americans believe the party’s leader, Donald Trump, is threatening democracy, while 51% believe he has committed federal crimes. Fifty-three percent of respondents have an unfavorable view of him, but as the Walker debacle illustrates, he has a strangle hold on the party.

Walker is just one of the diversely-flawed Republican candidates on the ballot this November. The thing they have in common is a total lack of character.

©2022 Jon Sinton