What we know about U.S. Senate candidate and Republican Mike Durant is pretty much what we see on his awful television commercials.
Sure, Durant is a survivor of a helicopter crash in Somalia – the Black Hawk Down pilot, which gave him some name recognition. But, really, when I saw one of the first commercials for his U.S. Senate campaign to replace retiring Sen. Richard Shelby, I was pretty disgusted.
Not because Durant is a Republican or that he claims he is “100 percent pro Trump.” Just about every Alabama Republican does that, because they believe Alabama voters are so thick, they can’t understand anything else.
No, it was invoking himself as somebody created by God to do what he’s doing. That kind of arrogance is simply weird. And scary. Who gets to claim THEY are God’s chosen human? Well, Durant did right out of the box.
Arrogant.
Then, as I continued to watch Durant’s television commercials, it also occurred to me that Durant is, well, mean. His Senate ads show Durant has no grace for anybody who has a different idea for how to move the country forward. Indeed, Durant, either on his Senate website or in his commercials, shows very little of how he’d help Alabama and the United States move forward. Mostly, it’s just stuff that Durant is against, which, to be fair, is pretty typical of Republican campaigns these days.
Republicans don’t have many ideas, except tax cuts for rich people, but they sure as hell plan to stop anybody who does.
That’s Mike Durant. And his advertising has an especially mean-spirited edge about it.
Everything Joe Biden does is a disappointment to Durant. Yeteven Republicans who voted against Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, including here in Alabama, have tried to take credit for some of the spending in the new law (U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer, for example, took credit for the money now available for the Northern Beltway in Birmingham that he voted against).
On his website, Durant is all in for Trump, disappointed in the bad decisions Biden makes “from the moment he wakes up in the morning,” against any mandates to prevent the spread of COVID, wants to build a wall to stop immigration. . . indeed, Durant appears to have no original ideas at all.
That’s kind of odd considering God himself put Durant on Earth to run for the Senate in Alabama.
And recently, we’ve learned that Durant even turned his back on his sister, who says she was a victim of sexual abuse for years by she and Durant’s father, who reportedly admitted the crime.
As stated by The Associated Press and Alabama Political Reporter, Durant “publicly accused his sister of lying about years of sexual abuse at the hands of their father despite telling his sister in letters that their father had admitted to the abuse.”
Durant is the stereotypical alpha-male who refuses to believe that a woman can be sexually abused by a relative, especially his relative. It’s that very attitude and action that prevents many women from coming forward after they have been sexually abused.
Durant’s sister, Mary, filed a federal civil lawsuit against their father, Leon Durant, in New Hampshire in 1994. In that filing, Mary Durant accused her father of sexually assaulting her from the time she was a toddler until she was 19. The lawsuit stated that the assaults on Mary Durant occurred “almost daily”between the ages of 14 and 17.
Despite what he told his sister in letters, Durant publicly stabbed his sister in the back. That’s pretty cold there.
On Friday, Durant’s sister released a statement to APR: “Incest occurred throughout my childhood. My father confessed in 1991, and soon afterward, he signed a contractual agreement with me. It set forth specific stipulations required for him to fulfill in lieu of legal consequences from me. In time, he failed to fulfill all stipulations set forth in the contract. Therefore, in 1994 I filed a civil lawsuit against my father for the crime of incest. This was my constitutional right as a citizen of the USA. The criminal statute of limitations had run out, leaving a civil suit as the only alternative. My brother and family chose to support my father and mother as they attempted to avoid the consequences. They all tried to silence me.”
Durant’s campaign is pretty mean overall, though. He doesn’t propose much of anything as far as policy goes but doesn’t mind saying what he’s against (most anything anybody but him believes; after all, he’s God’s man, right?).
But perhaps Durant’s is most arrogant when he assumes Alabama voters will support him because he’s a Trumper or because he’s against vaccine and mask mandates or because he’s against out-of-control spending by the radical left, whatever that means.
From what he allows us to see, there’s no real depth to Mike Durant’s thinking or campaign. He’s scrambling around now, doing damage control over how he responded to his sister’s alleged sexual abuse by her father, but you must live with your decisions, Mike Durant. Put your big-boy pants on.
Take responsibility, right?
“It is unfortunate for my brother that he participated in this behavior, as it is currently causing his character to be called into question,” Durant’s sister said in her most recent statement. “He (Durant) made poor choices years ago, not knowing it would come back in time to haunt him.”
Yet, that’s what happens when people act mean-spirited and arrogant. That’s what happens when candidates refuse to be honest.
One must be careful how they carry themselves, especially in public, because the stuff we try to hide eventually will come back to bite us on the butt.
Mike Durant is now well-bitten.
