If These People Get Their Way, 'Objective Journalists' Will Pine for the Days of Covering Gas Prices

A highly viable candidate for a United States Senate seat in the 2022 midterm elections once held a gun to his wife's head and threatened to blow her brains out. The candidate has not disputed his wife's account of the incident, which she says was not the only time he threatened to kill her. He's said he does not remember that first incident because he has dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. He revealed the diagnosis in his 2008 memoir, and around time of its release, his wife shared these stories. His therapist said he'd met a number of "alters"—alternate personalities—while treating Herschel Walker.

John Fetterman's struggles at a Pennsylvania Senate debate last month were justifiably scrutinized, but Fetterman stands a good chance of making a full recovery from the stroke he suffered a few months ago. Most of the coverage of Walker has focused on his almost comical illustration of the fact that Republican men make abortion laws that apply to other people, not themselves, and the notion that somehow he would be a better choice to make public policy than Sen. Raphael Warnock. Neither Walker nor three other Republican candidates in close Senate races responded when we asked for their plans to fight inflation and lower gas prices, but no matter. The Issues, as they are discussed in our politics and in the press, seem to be blunt objects to beat the other side with through constant repetition.

To be frank, the mainstream political press has played its part in this. The Media has by and large been led around by the nose for months, apart from some abortion hypocrisy stories and the occasional look at the Republicans angling to run state elections who consider Republican losses to be illegitimate. Sometimes the media has even been the arm wielding the blunt object.

Not that the press is broadly interested in the details. The Republican Party's actual plans seem to focus heavily on debt-ceiling Russian roulette and investigating Hunter Biden. They don't have much of a plan to deal with inflation, or any other problem. Democrats made inflation a couple percentage points worse with the American Rescue Plan, and they deserve scrutiny for that. But if the press were actually interested in solutions to these problems—on behalf of the voiceless people they claim to represent—they would insist that Republicans offer a path to fighting inflation beyond Not Being Democrats. (The Democrats, by the way, have a record of policy achievements on re-shoring manufacturing and clean-energy funding and even domestic oil production, if that's your cup of tea.) Yes, we like to throw the bums out in this country, but surely the political press could offer some insight into whether we're actually replacing them with superior bums.

Who are we kidding, though? This is a nation where the former speaker of the house can go on national television and hold up the aforementioned Herschel Walker as The Christian Candidate in a race where his opponent is a reverend who preaches from the pulpit at Martin Luther King Jr.'s church. The TV networks might as well put a reporter in front of a sign outside California's most expensive gas station and say the price of this commodity traded on a global market with an almost incomprehensible number of variables in play is all down to the current president. Fine, whatever—though we might at least ask that the precipitous drop in gas prices since the very real spike in June and July get an even vaguely comparable level of coverage. The drop in prices doesn't have much to do with Biden, either, but let's at least get some consistency.

That aforementioned former speaker, Newt Gingrich, helped usher in the era of shameless brinkmanship on the American right, and that shamelessness is now the coin of the realm. Yesterday, on Election Eve, the patriots who organized a Trump rally in Ohio trotted out J.R. Majewski, a House candidate who said he saw combat in Afghanistan until the AP and the New York Times reported they could only find records of a deployment to an American base in Qatar. The AP suggested his job was to load and unload airplanes. Not dishonorable work by any means, but not fighting Afghan insurgents, either. Majewski then settled on the notion his work in Afghanistan was classified. Oh, by the way, this guy was at the Capitol on January 6 and put out a campaign ad where he floated "kick[ing] down doors" while holding an AR-15 because "that's what patriots do."

Majewski introduced himself at the rally with the quip that his "pronouns are patriot and ass-kicker." Then he asked if anyone had seen "that drunk, nasty Nancy Pelosi" at a Trump rally(?) a week after some guy broke into her house with a hammer and asked about her whereabouts over and over until he bashed her husband with it. Trump followed this up by calling Pelosi "an animal" last night, the culmination of a week in which the incident became a laugh line at events for new-age Republicans like Kari Lake. Is anyone asking themselves how these people would be behaving if Pelosi's attacker had been successful in his stated aim to break her kneecaps?

These are questions that the political press, most especially the Objective Journalists, ought to be asking themselves. They ought to ask themselves where they think all this is going. Trump will declare his candidacy for 2024 in a matter of days as a means to paint the many investigations into his insane conduct as "political persecution." The press will soon enough cover him like just any other candidate who's a little rough around the edges.

But just for the record, let's have a look at what he's been saying over the last days and weeks. He's been spinning tales of violent immigrants, "large packs of sadistic criminals and thieves[…]allowed to go into stores and openly rob them, beat up their workers, kill their customers, and leave with armloads of goods but with no retribution." He's mused about executing accused drug dealers after the kind of due process favored by Chinese President For Life Xi Jinping. He's fantasized about forcing journalists to give up their sources by throwing them in jail with the expressed intent of making them victims of prison rape. The crowd laughed. This is the guy looking out for free speech, by the way.

The die may well be cast in the midterm elections taking place today. Walker may be a United States senator, which, even ruling out all the aforementioned baggage, is an insane development considering HE KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT ANY PUBLIC POLICY ISSUE WHATSOEVER. He will be a rubber-stamp vote for the Republican line, however, and what will that line be if Trump or someone like him takes the White House two years from now? Where, again, do we think this all is going? What do the Objective Journalists think their jobs will be like if these people get their way?

A Wisconsin governor candidate just promised an end to competitive elections in that state. The leaders of this movement aren't hiding anything, and they're assembling allies in state and national legislatures whose defining qualities are shamelessness and subservience to power. The more depraved, the better—it shows they won't have qualms when the time comes. They've already tried to throw out the votes of millions of American citizens to install their guy in the presidency. If they'd do that for power, what won't they do going forward? Maybe it's time for the establishment press to accept that they're on one side of the battle, not just watching it—unless, of course, they're down to become shamelessly subservient.

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