In mid-January of 2016, at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, Donald Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

He might have been more right than wrong. His followers seem to be able to forgive, no ignore, anything he does, no matter how vile. Remember the October 2016 surprise of the Access Hollywood tape? That made a lot of difference, didn’t it? “But her emails!”

Why did voters not fly like winged Mercury from such a morally challenged person? And should we be surprised they didn’t?

With that in mind, I have been struggling with what to make of the current senatorial contest in Georgia.

On the one hand, there is the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the junior United States senator from Georgia since 2021. Warnock is also the senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr.’s former congregation. He is the fifth and the youngest person to serve as Ebenezer’s senior pastor since its founding in 1886.

Warnock has always been a civil rights activist and has been arrested twice for his efforts. In March 2014, he led a sit-in at the Georgia State Capitol to press state legislators to accept the expansion of Medicaid offered by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. He and other leaders were arrested during the protest, and the state, to this day, has refused to expand its Medicaid program.

His first arrest, in the early 2000s, is instructive. Warnock was serving as senior pastor at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore, Maryland, when Police arrested him and an assistant minister charging them with obstructing an investigation into suspected child abuse at a summer camp run by their church. Warnock had strongly protested police not allowing lawyers to be present to assist camp counselors whom they had accused of covering up the suspected child abuse. According to the Police, Warnock was “extremely uncooperative and disruptive.” Interestingly, the charges were later dropped with the deputy state’s attorney acknowledging there had been a “miscommunication,” adding that Warnock had aided the investigation and that prosecution would be a waste of resources.

Warnock espouses a number of typically democratic policies:

• Regarding abortion, he labels himself a “pro-choice pastor;”
• In 2021 he was the main sponsor of S.278 —  The Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act of 2021, a bill that would provide assistance to historically disaffected minority groups in the agriculture sector;
• He is against capital punishment;
• The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund gave him a grade of “F” during his Senate campaign, because he loudly objected to parishioners being able to bring concealed weapons to church. For that, they labeled him “anti 2nd amendment;”
• On immigration, he has supported keeping Title 42 expulsions, saying, “We need assurances that we have security at the border and that we protect communities on this side of the border;”
• Warnock is a proponent of Welfare. He  opposed New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s workfare reforms while he was assistant pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1997, telling The New York Times, “We are worried that workfare is being used to displace other workers who receive respectable compensation. We are concerned that poor people are being put into competition with other poor people, and in that respect, we think workfare is a hoax;” and,
• Regarding voting rights, In his maiden speech on the U.S. Senate floor, Warnock said one of his primary goals upon assuming office was to oppose voting restrictions and support federal voting reforms. He has said that passing legislation to expand voting rights is important enough to end the Senate filibuster.

Warnock and his wife divorced in 2021. They have two children.

The man appears to be an open book. If you vote for Raphael Warnock, you know what you’re going to get, a God-fearing, decent human being who is a  liberal democrat, but not one of radical persuasion.

On the other hand, we have Warnock’s opponent Herschel Walker, whose main claim to fame seems to be winning the Heisman Trophy in his junior year at the University of Georgia and going on to enjoy a Hall of Fame caliber professional football career.

If Raphael Warnock’s life is a relatively virtuous straight line, Herschel Walker’s is a labyrinth worthy of Theseus, but without the guiding ball of twine.

Given that he’s running for the US Senate, Walker’s personal and professional lives are worthy of investigation.

Herschel Walker suffers from one of the many character flaws Donald Trump has artfully cultivated over a lifetime of trying: He exaggerates accomplishments, minimizes failures and repeatedly denies he does either. In everything. A few examples:

In his autobiography, Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder (Simon & Schuster, 2009), Walker describes his struggles with his mental health in a praiseworthy and open manner. However, in this commendable work he also wrote that during his schooling at Johnson County High School, he was the Beta Club president (which required a grade average of “A”) and class valedictorian.

Trouble is, he wasn’t. He was in the Beta Club, but not its president, and the school didn’t even begin having valedictorians until six years after Walker graduated. This is a small point. Many people embellish like this, but it sets the tone for the rest of Walker’s life to this point.

Walker has said in speeches and on his website he graduated from the University of Georgia in the top 1% of his class.

Trouble is, this isn’t true. He left college at the end of his junior year to play professional football. The false claims about Walker’s degree and class stranding are lodged in a range of webpages, including his Amazon author site, his Speaker Booking Agency page and his New Georgia Encyclopedia entry. Additionally, in 2017, he told Sirius XM radio, “I also was in the top 1% of my graduating class of college.” When called out on this by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Walker said, “I was majoring in Criminal Justice at UGA when I left to play in the USFL my junior year. After playing with the New Jersey Generals, I returned to Athens to complete my degree, but life and football got in the way.” Walker has also denied on numerous occasions ever saying he graduated from UGA. According to a CNN investigation, “This is flat out false.”

Walker’s business career following his sporting one has been spotty at best. In 1999, he created Renaissance Man Food Services, which distributes chicken products. He told the Dallas Morning News in 2009 that Renaissance Man Food Services employed more than 100 people and grossed $70 million a year. In a more recent interview, Walker told Fox News that the company employed 600 people.

Trouble is, it doesn’t. During the pandemic, Renaissance Man Food Services reported just eight employees on applications for two Paycheck Protection Program loans from the federal Small Business Administration totaling $180,000. The first loan in April 2020 amounted to $111,300 and has since been forgiven.

On top of that, over the past two decades Walker and various business partners have defaulted or fallen behind in payments on at least eight loans totaling $9 million, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of hundreds of pages of court documents, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other public records that detail these financial issues.

Walker has many times claimed he “worked in law enforcement.” Prior to his political career, he has, at various times said he was an FBI agent, or “a certified peace officer.”

Trouble is, he wasn’t. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Patricia Murphy, Greg Bluestein and Tia Mitchell thoroughly debunked these claims in June of this year.

Then their is the spousal abuse. Cindy DeAngelis Grossman, Walker’s wife from 1983 until their divorce in 2002, claims Walker was violent with her and had “evil in his eyes.” She says, “He held the gun to my temple and said he was gonna blow my brains out.”

Walker has not denied Grossman’s allegations, telling ABC News’ Bob Woodruff in a 2008 interview that he “probably did it,” but did not remember.

And now for the biggest problem, the new one.

Herschel Walker has embraced the anti abortion plank. His position makes no accommodation for rape, incest or the life of the mother. It is as hard a line as one could draw. Walker says he believes abortion should never be a “choice.” “There’s no exception in my mind,” Walker told reporters in May. “Like I say, I believe in life. I believe in life.”

Trouble is, he doesn’t. At least, not for him, according to what appears to be a well-documented report from The Daily Beast this week. According to the report:

A woman who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns told The Daily Beast that after she and Walker conceived a child while they were dating in 2009 he urged her to get an abortion. The woman said she had the procedure and that Walker reimbursed her for it.

She supported these claims with a $575 receipt from the abortion clinic, a “get well” card from Walker, and a bank deposit receipt that included an image of a signed $700 personal check from Walker.

The woman said there was a $125 difference because she “ball-parked” the cost of an abortion after Googling the procedure and added on expenses such as travel and recovery costs.

Additionally, The Daily Beast independently corroborated details of the woman’s claims with a close friend she told at the time and who, according to the woman and the friend, took care of her in the days after the procedure.

The woman said Walker, who was not married at the time, told her it would be more convenient to terminate the pregnancy, saying it was “not the right time” for him to have a child. It was a feeling she shared, but what she didn’t know was that Walker had an out-of-wedlock child with another woman earlier that same year.

Walker has denied everything about this. He claims he doesn’t even know the woman even though he sent her that “get well” card with a check for $700 inside it. He said, “I send money to a lot of people.” Yesterday morning, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked him whether he has discovered who this woman is? “Not at all,” Walker replied. “And that’s what I hope everyone can see. It’s sort of like everyone is anonymous, or everyone is leaking, and they want you to confess to something you have no clue about.”

This is an amazing statement, because the unidentified woman claims, in addition to Walker paying for her abortion, she subsequently bore his child, a child The Daily Beast reports he has acknowledged as his.

This has proven too much for Walker’s adult son, Christian Walker, who lashed out on Twitter—in defense of The Daily Beast’s abortion story and against his father.

“Every family member of Herschel Walker asked him not to run for office, because we all knew (some of) his past. Every single one,” Walker tweeted.

“He decided to give us the middle finger and air out all of his dirty laundry in public, while simultaneously lying about it.

Following The Daily Beast’s scoop, Walker’s fundraising has soared, and Republicans have remained steadfast in their unwavering support. Moreover, despite his checkered past and these latest allegations, the senate race remains neck and neck. Why is that so?

I suggest it has nothing to do with Herschel Walker and everything to do with taking control of the US Senate. Even if Walker proved to be the second coming of Jack The Ripper, hard core Republicans in Georgia and around the country would continue to support him. It’s not that they don’t believe the latest allegations, they just don’t care about them. Controlling both the House and the Senate overrides everything. Power is quite the aphrodisiac.

Donald Trump, the man who could shoot people on 5th Avenue and get away with it, is a big Walker supporter, as is every Republican leader who’s been asked about him (with the exception of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who won’t say a word about him).

I’m no psychologist, but I think Walker is a very troubled man with mental health issues needing serious help. It is reprehensible that Republicans are doing all they can to exploit this damaged person for their own ends. If he wins the election and falls off the face of the earth the day after, they wouldn’t mind. They’d have what they wanted, and that would be all that mattered. His is a truly sad story.

At his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln, pleading for a unified country, appealed to “the better angels of our nature.”

There are no “angels” here, better or otherwise. The mid-term election is less than a month away. In that month, there will be more charges, denials, and countercharges. It grieves me to believe that rising above to find Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature” may no longer be possible deep in the cesspool that now passes for American Democracy.