Hoping Walker Fumbles And Warnock Scores A Winning Touchdown
Does anyone else find it odd that a state that has long been at or near the top of America’s most racist places is on the brink of possibly electing an African American who lies about everything from his business experience to his number of children.
That would be Herschel Walker, the one time, all-time NFL football player and All-American for the University of Georgia who launched his first political campaign in Georgia’s 2022 Senate election, won the Republican nomination with 68 percent of the vote and will face incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., in the general election in November, in a key contest that could give the Republicans the majority in the Senate.
So Georgia, elect Walker as the spokesman for the NFL but not the U.S. Senate. Do the good people of Georgia believe that Walker could sprint all the way to legislative success without having one moment of experience governing and do they care?
Apparently racists believe a black man who can run really fast may be good enough to be in the Senate. Or maybe, just maybe, those Georgia rednecks are still so angry that another African American, the incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., was the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate by a former state of the Confederacy. Not only that but Warnock is the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate and on top of it all, Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both elected to the Senate in 2021, were the first Democrats voted in the Senate from Georgia since Zell Miller in 2000. That is enough to convince Georgia’s race conscious voters to choose anyone, an old shoe, a piece of gum, a tick, over Warnock.
Warnock began his first term in office on Jan. 20, 2021, after he beat incumbent Republican trumper Kelly Loeffler in the runoff in a special election on Jan. 5, 2021. Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, appointed Loeffler in December 2019 to fill the Senate seat of GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson, who resigned for health reasons.
In 2005, Warnock became senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s former congregation.
Warnock gained statewide prominence as leading activist in the campaign to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. From June 2017 to January 2020, Warnock chaired the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan organization focused on voter registration. He called for the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, supports increasing COVID-19 relief funding, supports abortion rights and gay marriage, and opposes the concealed carry of firearms.
Warnock voted to convict trump for his role in inciting the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021; he co-sponsored an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour; and he delivered the first speech on the Senate floor in support of the passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And that is why the good people of Georgia can’t stomach Warnock.
Which brings us to Walker, the 60-year-old Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Georgia and member of the College Football Hall of Fame. He then tarred for 12 seasons in the National Football League (NFL).
Walker supported trump in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020 and spoke on trump’s behalf at the 2020 Republican National Convention. In 2018, trump appointed Walker to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition and that’s about it for government experience. Oh, my bad, did mention that Walker claimed he was an honorary deputy in the Cobb County Police Department although the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that Walker’s claims about working in law enforcement were either false or unverifiable. The Cobb County Police Department also had no record of Walker working with them.
Walker and trump have been longtime friends, using the term loosely when referring to trump. In 2009, Walker was a contestant in the second season of the reality television show, “The Celebrity Apprentice,” a spinoff from “The Apprentice,” trump’s reality show that catapulted him to national fame. Walker was fired during the eighth episode for failing to fulfill his role as “Project Manager” in which he was tasked to create a new meal for Schwan’s LiveSmart frozen-food line.
Walker was endorsed by trump because he supports trump’s big lie to overturn the election results. Walker has spread many conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and said that Biden “didn’t get 50 million” votes, while, in fact, Biden received more than 80 million votes. Walker claimed there was “country wide election fraud” and urged trump and “true patriots” to complete “a total cleansing” to “prosecute all the bad actors.” The former gridiron star also repeated a conspiracy theory that the 2021 Capitol attack by trump supporters was actually a “well planned” distraction from election fraud.
Then there is his questionable business background, somewhat like his guardian angel, trump.
In 1984, Walker franchised a D’Lites fast food restaurant in Athens, Georgia. In 1999, he created Renaissance Man Food Services, which distributes chicken products. He founded Savannah-based H. Walker Enterprises in 2002 as an umbrella company for most of his other business ventures, the largest of which was Renaissance Man Food Services.
Walker touted Renaissance Man Food Services as a “mini-Tyson Foods” and repeatedly claimed the company had more than 100 employees, $70 million in annual sales, owned chicken processing plants and was one of the largest minority-owned meat processors in the nation. That’s not how it came out in a deposition he provided for a lawsuit against him, in which Walker said his company actually averaged about $1.5 million in annual profits from 2008 and 2017. A business associate of Walker testified that the company does not own chicken processing plants; rather, Walker licensed his name to the enterprise. In a 2018 declaration submitted in a legal case against his company, Walker acknowledged that the company did not own any chicken processing plants and instead partnered with plant owners to sell branded chicken products.
In April 2020, Renaissance Manufacturing applied for a federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the loan application, the company reported that it had just eight employees and the company ultimately received two PPP loans totaling $180,000, of which $111,300 was forgiven. On the Senate campaign trail, Walker mocked the PPP program.
Still on the road to prevarication, Walker repeatedly lied that he started and owned a drapery company, which he claimed in February 2022 to have 250 employees.
During his Senate campaign, Walker said that fatherless households were a “major, major problem” in African-American communities. He had divorced his wife and they had a son, who lives with Walker. Walker’s social concerns, however, don’t include his personal life as the former football star lied about the fact that he has two additional sons and a daughter, who live elsewhere. In a 2001 divorce filing, Walker’s then-wife, Cindy Grossman, accused him of having pointed a pistol at her head and said, “I’m going to blow your f’ing brains out.” She also said he had used knives to threaten her. Walker said his aberrant behavior with his wife and others was a result of having been diagnosed in 2001 with dissociative identity disorder.
So there is Hershel Walker, who is very much like trump, another blowhard who had zero experience governing and who demonstrated the acumen of a mushroom, sorry to use that metaphor again, if you know what I mean, and the honesty and ethics of wet cardboard while the two shared another avocation of abusing women. And in the same blowhard category there are a slew of Republican members of congress, including Lauren Boebert, Matt Goetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louis Gohmert, Jim Jordan and senate hopeful, Eric Greitens. So yes, many voters have very odd ideas about what makes a good leader. Maybe we can hope for trump in 2024, joined by Vice President Rudy Giuliani, Defense Secretary Michael Flynn , Press Secretary Steve Bannon, Attorney General Michael Cohen, CIA Director Roger Stone and Secretary of Commerce Mike “The Pillow Guy” Lindell. Don’t laugh, it could happen.
And then there is the brain-eating amoeba in Iowa, who might just be the ideal candidate for president.
But in the name of fairness, it should be said that another Republican politician could give trump a run for his title of top sleaze and immorality king. That would be William Lloyd Scott who represented Virginia in the House of Representatives and later, the Senate. He was elected to the House in 1966, was re-elected twice and was in the Senate from 1973 to 1979.
An unabashed racist, when criticizing the implementation of the Post Office’s ZIP Code program in 1973, Scott said, “the only reason we need zip codes is because niggers can’t read.” His name also was included in an exposé of Congressional staff hiring practices as one of the members who had given “No Blacks” and other similar instructions to the Capitol Hill Placement Bureau. Scott allegedly displayed anti-Semitism while in Congress and told one Jewish applicant, “Oh, I’ve got too many of them here now to hire you.”
While being briefed about the military capabilities of the Soviet Union, Scott confused missile silos for grain silos and said “Wait a minute! I’m not interested in agriculture. I want the military stuff.” In 1975, he visited the Middle East and mistook the Suez Canal for the Persian Gulf, refused to enter a mosque because it wasn’t “a Christian building”, and asked Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “What is this Gaza stuff? I have never understood that.”
Trump, Scott and Walker, dumb, dumber and dumbest.