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Opinion Herschel Walker’s anti-tree campaign is genius

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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By Dana Milbank
Columnist |
August 23, 2022 at 5:45 p.m. EDT

So, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) thinks poor “candidate quality” may keep the GOP from winning back a Senate majority in November.
Conservative writer Matt Lewis put a finer point on it in the Daily Beast on Tuesday: “Trump’s Legacy is Convincing Idiots That They Should Run for Office,” was the headline atop his column on the weak Republican nominees backed by the former president.
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Sorry, but both men are barking up the wrong tree.
Consider just one of the bright lights of the Trump-selected Senate slate: former pro football star Herschel Walker, who is running away with the ideas primary. At a time when few in the GOP are offering more than doom-and-gloom pronouncements about crime, immigration and inflation, Walker, the Republican nominee in Georgia, gets the Heisman for creative policies.
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On Sunday, he came out against trees.


Democrats such as President Biden and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Walker declared, “try to fool you like they’re helping you out, but they’re not. They’re not helping you out, because a lot of the money is going into trees. You know that, don’t you? It’s going into trees. We’ve got enough trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?”
Finally, a politician with the guts to speak the obvious, painful truth: This country has too many damned trees. And we need to start deporting them.
Paul Waldman: What Herschel Walker’s clueless campaign says about the GOP
“Yes, you heard me right,” Walker later tweeted after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on his anti-tree position. Biden and Warnock “are spending $1.5 billion on ‘urban forestry’ and raising taxes on those making under $200k to pay for it. Yes, I have a problem with that.”
Actually, the Democratic climate, energy and health-care law to which Walker refers doesn’t raise tax rates on any individual; it cracks down on wealthy tax cheats and billion-dollar corporations that avoid taxes. But even for corporate behemoths and rich tax dodgers, money doesn’t grow on trees — which is another reason we don’t need more of them branching out in our communities with their messy foliage.
It is time for us to harden our hearts against the hardwoods, and we shouldn’t go soft on the softwoods, either. Of course, that’s easy for me to say given my profession’s tree-killing heritage; we in the newspaper business still coldly refer to the print paper as the “dead-tree edition.” But trees have been a green, leafy menace for humans ever since Adam and Eve ate forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
George Washington may not have chopped down the cherry tree, but he should have: Japanese cherry blossoms now cause massive traffic jams in the capital every spring. True, an apple falling from a tree tipped Isaac Newton off to gravity, but it just as easily could have concussed him.
Cats get stuck in trees. Tree branches knock out our power lines. Those forest fires devastating the West? Wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have trees. And, without trees, we wouldn’t have to rake the forest anymore, the way they do in Finland.
As Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake might say, this tree takedown by Walker has BDE: big deciduous energy. His anti-arborism positions him in a great American tradition, as a mighty Paul Bunyan to Warnock’s Johnny Appleseed, a wily Once-ler to Warnock’s Lorax.
Walker’s roots run deep in science policy. He noted last month that when “good air” from the United States “decides to float over to China,” it is replaced by “bad air” from China and “we got to clean that back up.”
Walker previously discovered the existence of a “dry mist” that “will kill any covid on your body.” And he was able to disprove Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by observing that “there still [are] apes” that have not turned into humans.
Such towering feats have led Walker to boast about his past as an FBI agent and his police work in Georgia, his status as valedictorian of his high school class and his rank “in the top 1 percent of my graduating class in college.” Not one of these boasts is true, but Walker’s creativity in inventing them is only more evidence of his boundless, if universally unappreciated, intellect.
In the campaign against trees, some might think Walker is out on a limb. Even his mentor, Donald Trump, committed the United States to joining the World Economic Forum’s One Trillion Trees initiative to grow and conserve trees. Studies show planting more trees could reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by as much as 25 percent — a powerful antidote to climate change.
But these pro-tree saps can’t see what Walker sees: Trees are the enemy within. They fill our noses with pollen, admit squirrels to our roofs, clog our gutters with leaves, dent our cars with acorns. And, underneath it all, their invasive roots threaten our very foundations.

 
This is a message that should resonate with Iowa fans.

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