WTF Is Herschel Walker Talking About?

There are things that make no sense–like how living in Pittsburgh, somehow I can drive to Buffalo, Baltimore, D.C., Cleveland or Columbus faster than the PA turnpike will get me to Philly–and then there’s Herschel Walker’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate, which manages to be an outlier even in this era of absurdity as a political norm.

The novelty of sham runs for political office by Black D-listers posing as conservatives wore around time the late Herman Cain parlayed his asinine “9-9-9” tax plan into a radio show and regular appearances on Fox News. Walker’s no Kim Klacik; his name has actually meant something in the world, at least as an athlete, since the 1980s. He’s already making good coin on the public speaking circuit and through various businesses, so trying to unseat incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock for his seat representing Georgia is an unlikely way to try to grab an extra bag. All of that’s said by way of putting Walker’s Senate candidacy, and his bizarre way of trying to win the seat, in context. If Walker lives in Georgia at all, it’s just barely. For as much time as he’s spent campaigning in the Republican primary there, he skipped the first debate against his competitors, leaving them to take as many shots at him as possible with no rebuttal. That might be because his campaign advisers, whoever they are, knew that no rebuttal was better than the verbal shitshow he let loose last weekend in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Baritoromo:

My head already exploded from sitting through all nine minutes of this mess, so I’ll save you the aggravation. Walker says, among other things, that the Biden Administration “decided that they were going to give up our energy,” to whom and how and for what, he doesn’t specify, and that “there’s no food on the shelf”—which is odd because I definitely went to Whole Foods this weekend and grabbed some grapes and Chilean sea bass on sale. I’m not sure where Walker shops, but he can definitely afford to go to places that keep food in stock. He continued: “This is one of the most environmental drilling countries in the world but yet we’re walking on all the resources we have under our feet and we won’t say, ‘Hey, guys, we gotta come out of this.”Huh?

It’d be easy to laugh at that except for the fact that right now, Walker is actually polling ahead of every other candidate in Georgia’s GOP Senate primary, and ahead of Warnock in a hypothetical general election contest that could tip the balance of power in the evenly divided Senate. There’s no telling what certain Georgia voters see in Walker, a man who won’t even tell the easily-findable truth that he didn’t actually graduate from UGA and also swears he knows the cure for the ‘Rona, but I have my suspicions about why that’s more palatable to folks who also voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene than an incumbent who currently pastors the church once led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.