In the one and only debate for the 2022 race for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat, the supposed “great athlete” Hershel Walker talked about rising costs of insulin and said that people who are worried about the costs should simply “eat right”.
“I believe in reducing insulin”, he said, “but at the same time, you gotta eat right. I know many people that’s on insulin. Unless you’re eating right, insulin is doing you no good. So you have to get food prices down and you gotta get gas down so you can go get insulin.”
As a recently-diagnosed diabetic, this commentator was absolutely apoplectic to his blatant display of ignorance when it comes to those who suffer from diabetes. In addition to having diabetes, my maternal grandfather and my father both had diabetes, as well as several relatives and good friends. I’m well aware of the requirements and responsibilities that I’m now having to undergo. Eating right is only one part of dealing with diabetes, and the problem isn’t “lowering insulin”. For those with juvenile or Type-1 diabetes, they have no insulin at all. Eating right doesn’t help at all if your body cannot produce insulin.
No, the problem isn’t “eating right.” The problem is the price of insulin and how those of us who have to have it are paying more and more for it. Not having insulin is not a choice. You can’t skip a few days and eat salads and drink water. The problem is price-gouging, like so many other forms of proscription medication. Drugs that people have to buy, and many have to decide between that and eating, that and paying bills, that and having a home.
I suppose we could dismiss Walker’s pronouncement as simply an ignorant statement made by one with a problem telling the truth and an even worse problem with other personal behaviors. But he isn’t the only one.
Another senate wannabe running for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat is TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz. The carpetbagging doctor has been struggling against his opponent, Lt. Governor John Fetterman, when a member of his campaign staff made the comment that if Fetterman had ever eaten vegetables in his life, then he never would have suffered a stroke back in May.
Now, again, this is something that comes from pure ignorance, not to mention the assumption that Fetterman never ate a salad. But the TV personality who is supposedly a doctor didn’t speak out about the statement or say that the staff member was out of line in their pronouncement. You would think that a doctor would be quick to correct such a matter even done by his own staff. But, nope.
Then again, Dr. Oz apparently has something of a problem with promoting things that don’t work. Like the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19, which has yet to be proven. Or raspberry ketones and green coffee extract for weight loss. Or that lavender soap cures leg cramps. In fact the British Medical Journal back in 2014 studied Oz’s broadcasts and found that a vast majority of his health recommendations made in those broadcasts were not based on actual evidence.
It sounds like these two candidates have a problem with the truth. But then you factor in that these two are the hand-picked candidates of a certain narcissist who used to be the President of the United States. A man with a history of questionable business tactics and dealings. A man currently facing fraud charges in New York about his properties.
Let’s get brutally honest here... the party that used to be called the GOP before it became the Trump Party has a pretty sordid history of having hacks and quacks in their ranks.
In 2005, Senator Bill Frist, a heart surgeon as well as Senate Majority Leader at the time, made a diagnosis on Terri Schiavo on the floor of the Senate. Schiavo was being kept alive through a feeding tube and her parents were fighting to keep her alive even though the medical experts said that there was no mental capacity other than the part of her brain that controls automatic functions like breathing and heart. A heart specialist who made a judgement on the medical state of a vegetative person’s brain thousands of miles away. It is textbook quackery. And he can claim all he wants that he didn’t make “a diagnosis” on the floor of the Senate, but when you are speaking as an authority, whether as a doctor or as an elected official, on the medical status of someone based on your knowledge and experience and information presented to you, then you *are* making a diagnosis. Period. End of argument.
Of course we can always talk about the scam they continually spread about “trickle-down economics”. The idea that if you give tax cuts and tax breaks to Big Business and the wealthy that it would “trickle-down” to the rest of us. That was proven to be a lie during the Great Recession. Businesses got tax cuts and then said things were “too unstable” to create jobs. Big Business made profits while the rest of America struggled to stay afloat and get jobs.
And I’m sure some idiot will scream “what about the Democrats? What about their cons? What about Hillary? What about Hunter Biden?” Hillary Clinton is not a senator anymore, and nobody has said a single thing about whatever the son of the current President supposedly did or did not do other than he got a job in the Ukraine before it was invaded by Russia. A lot of flatulence there but no excrement, which fits right in as yet another scam. Plus, I don’t see either of them running for the U.S. Senate right now, unlike the former athlete and TV doctor.
This commentator hopes that Walker and Oz lose their respective campaigns for the Senate, and not just because of the games that they’ve played. To have these kinds of duplicitous and ignorant people sitting in any kind of government capacity would do the whole country a disservice.
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