Herschel Walker, candidate for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat.

You can tell because a CNN idiot has launched an ugly personal attack against Walker.

There might be a bigger idiot at CNN, but Chris Cillizza clearly is in the running with his, “A Herschel Walker candidacy is a total nightmare for Senate Republicans.”

That’s not a brain fart; he didn’t mean to say that Walker would be a nightmare for Democrats, something that anyone with half a brain would know.

But Cillizza’s half brain in the below video tries to dirty Walker with the kind of nasty personal attack that defines the worst of today’s media commentary. Part of the attack, and a reason that Cillizza thinks disqualifies Walker, is his dissociative identity disorder.

The disorder explains his sometimes violent past, including his abuse of his then-wife. But his 2009 biography, Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder, explains how he combatted that illness.

With all the emphasis today on mental illness, I’m amazed that anyone on a (kinda) major network (CNN), would launch this un-woke attack on someone who had an illness and overcame it. It’s the lowest of the low.

I’m reminded of the Thomas Eagleton affair. He had been George McGovern’s running mate in the 1972 presidential race. Word leaked out that Eagleton in the 1960s was hospitalized for depression and had undergone electroshock treatment. Eagleton later explained that he had a history of nervous exhaustion and fatigue.

Quickly the issue became, “Do you want a whacko to have his finger on the nuclear war button?” After McGovern first said he stood behind Eagleton “one-thousand percent,” the blowback against a deranged (as we were supposed to believe) candidate became so intense that Eagleton dropped out of the race.

Cillizza returns us now to those days when mental illness was considered to be an incurable disease and cause for ostracizing and institutionalization. Lock the crazy uncle away in the attic.

Never mind that Walker gives public voice to those suffering from the disorder. Or that the illness is treatable. For them, Walker’s life is a symbol of hope.

Of course Cillizza comes up with other lines of attack. Among them: Walker long has been living out of Georgia, where he first gained famed as a Heisman Trophy running back for the University of Georgia. So, should Hilary Clinton, a reverse carpet bagger from Arkansas and Illinois, not have run for the New York Senate seat?

This is a threadbare response, but suppose, say, FoxNews commentator Tucker Carlson had said the same thing about a Democratic candidate’s “past behavior.” As if he were truly concerned about putting someone in the Senate who at any moment could break into a (hint, hint) violent act. Editorial boards at the New York Times and Washington Post would swing into action and MSNBC would broadcast a special on “right-wing insensitivity.” And the rest of us would once again sigh at the hypocrisy of it all.

For those interested in the Walker candidacy, here’s his campaign commercial.