Day 581 – Hershel and the New Right

Sunday, August 21, 2022

I’ve always liked Hershel Walker. He and Earl Campbell tore up football for years with their running. When Walker went pro he didn’t get a team that appreciated his abilities. That was unfortunate, because had they, they could have gone to the Super Bowl. Walker was bullied as a kid. He was the fat out of shape child. He went to the football coach and asked what could he do. The coach put him on a developmental program, and the rest is history. One of the things Walker does is one thousand situps and a thousand pushups a day. I don’t know if he still does that but that was what I read a long time ago, pretty impressive. When he was on Dancing with the Stars they did a montage piece on him. I remember him saying, “I’ve done a lot of things in my life.” The piece went on to show him doing ballet, creating a barbecue sauce, and playing football. I can’t help but think that Hershel wants to be a senator to notch “another thing” in his belt of life. 

But there’s another side to Walker that isn’t talked about much. He has some deep seated anger or mental illness. I’ve heard it described both ways. The recent ad where his ex-wife says he held a gun to her head and said he was going to blow her brains out illustrates that other side.

Hum. Hershel is a nice guy with a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. Perhaps? Whatever he is, he is not senate material.

Then there’s Ron DeSantis and lord knows what he is thinking, or any of these right conservative whatever you want to call them. They seem to want to stop all abortions, destroy public schools so they can siphon the money off into christian white nationalist madras and impose some kind of weird utopian view. The problem is it will make those going through that process bigots, which they seem to want, and uneducated and ultimately incompetent, which will lead to a new dumber reality. Which will destroy the nation as we know it.

An article in the Atlantic talked about a fellow who went down to a conservative conference and visited a lot of people he has known. The new young conservatives actually believe that there is a left wing that wants to eliminate them. This is of course nonsense, but it empowers them to do that* to anyone who has different views that they have.

*ie make people into “the other” and see themselves as under attack and therefore anything goes.

Very disturbing.

Then there are all the right wingers who decry the raid on Mar-a-Lago. They, of course, don’t mention all the attempts that were made to try and obtain the material by other means. I also decry the search at Mir-a-Lago because it was not conducted like most searches. I would have preferred they come in the middle of the night when Donnie and Melanie were there. That they break down the door with a battering ram, even if the door was unlocked. Hold everyone at gunpoint, cuff Donald in his underwear and make him stand on the front porch for hours where everyone could see him and take pictures. And that they tear up his lawn with their vehicles, eat chicken wings in his house, throw the trash wherever and make fun of him by saying things like “there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.” That. That would be a more typical all-American raid.

But NOOOOO, they went in and did a professional no-nonsense job.

And despite all the ballyhooing that the rightwingers are having, no one has explained why he wanted those records or why he didn’t return them when asked.

We are in a long dark slide. I am hopeful that some of these people will lose in the upcoming elections.

The amazing thing to me is that one party is actually doing things to improve our lives and the other is doing everything they can to rob us and screw up the country. Yet we are in a 50/50 stand-off with the balance able to go either way.