We fervently hope the record number of Georgians voting early for their Senate runoff is bad news for Texas resident, werewolf wannabe, walking mass murderer of the complete
sentence and bobble-headed GOP lickspittle Herschel Walker, who's already
lurched through a messy profusion of lies, gaffes and WTF-isms: Bad air,
Air Bud, horny bulls, too many trees, how many kids he has and abortions he's funded, his beloved Paw Patrol badge etc. Over 500,000 Georgia residents have already cast ballots for the Dec. 6 runoff, with progressives rallying behind Sen. Raphael Warnock's "
soul work" in an unconscionably close race that could give Democrats a vital 51 votes in the Senate. Voters - Warnock's
mom! - seemed aware of the stakes, with Saturday's first day of voting breaking the state record for the most ballots cast in a single day in early voting. That victory came only after Republicans fought to stop it, using a bizarre rule about voting around holidays to
block early voting during the Thanksgiving weekend, because damn the last thing we want in an electoral democracy is people voting. In response, Dems and Warnock's campaign
filed a lawsuit that
became "a rout from start to finish" through multiple rulings and appeals up to the state Supreme Court; ultimately, 13 judges, most appointed by GOP governors,
rejected the GOP's dirty tricks.
Among voters is a massive, newly galvanized segment of climate-change-conscious
young people who in the mid-terms voted about 2 to 1 for Warnock over Walker; those same 18-to-29-year-olds are reportedly both voting in droves in the runoff, and
bringing along friends and family who didn't vote earlier. Nationwide, there are about 90 million milennials and Gen Z voters - they now outnumber us ole-folk baby-boomers - so you'd think candidates, even clueless GOP ones, would figure them into their power equations. But nope. "What do you say to them?" asked a right-wing pundit of the ever-fumbling Herschel Walker, who put on glasses to look serious for the occasion but still
veered into a bonkers, hostile, love-it-or-leave-it tangent about not having the right to want to change anything about this country.
"Well, first of all, they dunno the grass is not greener on the other side," he intoned. "And they think there's someplace better than the United States of America. My thing is, 'why don't you go there?' 'Cause there's not." He went on to say "our biggest problem" is that young people "haven't earned the right" to a voice so they should just go someplace else, maybe with good air, and of course they'd be stripped of their citizenship and if they want to come back they'd have to get back through the border, maybe with barbed wire by then? (We made that last part up.) In the week before voting began, so it went. After a CNN KFile crew reviewed Walker's campaign speeches, they found that in January he'd said "I live in Texas," in a rambling story he'd repeated "as I was sitting in my home in Texas," and he'd gotten a $1,500 tax break on that Dallas home, which he declared his official "primary residence," which Georgia election officials might find odd. This week, more journalists doing their job at The Daily Beast found the Georgia house Walker has repeatedly, boastfully claimed he's owned for 17 years is, in fact, a small cash cow for him and his wife, who actually owns it and who collected tens of thousands of dollars in rental income from the aforementioned "Georgia residence" up until 2021, when Walker announced his Senate candidacy, having days before registered to vote in the state he was now aspiring to represent. Finally, there's his September interview"to address the rumors that he is a pawn for the Republican Party" in which he said that, in his few trips to Georgia from his longtime Texas home, he would "hardly ever" stay at his Atlanta house because he "didn't want to clean up," and preferred staying in hotels. But, you know, still in Georgia. So when it comes to the GOP putting a black face on white supremacy, all good. Finally, yet another woman has come forward to say he's violent and unwell.
Tired but true, from Maya Angelou: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." And then let other people hear him too. Thus did Raphael Warnock release this week's final, blistering ad. It shows Walker speaking, and Georgian voters listening, and it's a killer. There's Herschel babbling about "a movie called Fright Night or Freak Night or some kinda night": "Y'all ever watch a stupid movie late at night and you keep hoping it'll get better and it don't but ya keep watchin' it anyway?" His lesson: "A werewolf can kill a vampire, do you know that?! ( (Not.) So I dont wanna be a vampire anymore, I wanna be a werewolf." From the guy who it turns out has 3 or is it 4 kids he was hiding and at least two abortions he paid for, there's also the story about "this bull out in the field with six cows, and three of 'em are pregnant...so you know he's got something going on." And there's his renowned treatise on climate change: "Our good air decided to float over to China's bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then we got we to clean that back up." His listeners are suitably stunned: "What on earth?!...Is he for real?...Y'all serious about this, right?...Unbelievable...This is embarassing. Let's call it what it is." Warnock: "Georgia can do better." Georgia, you know what to do.
