He Stupes to Conquer

When politics gives you a moron, make moronade

Herschel Walker was widely mocked and criticized for flashing an honorary deputy sheriff’s badge onstage at a Georgia Senate debate Friday after his Democratic opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, called him out for pretending to be a police officer.

Get ready for more.

Walker, a Republican, is now showing the badge, one of at least two he has from Georgia sheriffs, in TV interviews. He plans to tout it in a video cut for social media with Johnson County Sheriff Greg Rowland, who gave him the badge. And Walker’s campaign told NBC News that it has ordered 1,000 imitation plastic law enforcement badges that say “I’m with Herschel” as a fundraising tool. – NBC News, “Herschel Walker tries to turn ‘prop’ badge controversy into campaign gold.”

DENTEEN, Ga. — Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker is turning yet another campaign gaffe into a PR advantage with a campaign to make “Georgia City” — the non-existent town he mistakenly identified as the state capital in a recent campaign appearance — into the actual capital of the Peach State.

Walker held a press conference on a small parcel of land just outside the town of Denteen that he claimed to have purchased and said he would incorporate the parcel as Georgia City and then “pass a law” making it the new state capitol.

“See, people make out like I made a mistake,” Walker told reporters. “But it wasn’t a mistake, it was a vision, and now I’m gonna make it real like Jesus told me to do.”

Walker deputy campaign chairman Gus Wallow said the candidate’s plan for a new state capital was “the kind of bold innovation that proves Herschel Walker is the forward-looking candidate in this race who is ready to literally break new ground for Georgia’s future.”

Walker had made reference to “the capital of our great state, Georgia City, where I’ll be proud to serve as your Senator” during a campaign event at Frisbee, Georgia’s Central High School. When the school’s principal suggested, over the audience’s confused laughter, that Walker had misspoken, the candidate insisted that he had not and that Georgia City was “my favorite city in Georgia except for Disney World.”

At the Denteen press conference, when asked whether he had sounded out the Georgia General Assembly or Governor Brian Kemp on his plan, Walker first asked what the Assembly was, then said they “sound like a lot of good Christian men” who would “get along with me when I tell them God called me to move the capital, and vote for me and then help me get the buildin’ on the truck.”

Walker then, apparently confusing Governor Kemp with his Democratic rival, incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock, accused Kemp of “trying to send all the Mexican immigrants to Georgia” and “voting Democrat all the time with the Democrat Joe Biden and the Democrat Democrats” before a hurried conference with aides, after which he told reporters Kemp was a “good Christian man” who had “been to my house Sunday and said I could move the capital any place I want so long as I pay for it, and I’m gonna do it with the debit cards they give me and not raise anybody’s taxes.”

Walker then strolled the parcel of land — about two acres square mainly covered with scrub grass, old tires, possum carcasses, and some rusted metal wreckage that an onlooker who identified himself as Soapy said was “the REE-mains of Ol’ Man Dribble’s still.” Walker pointed to various parts of the land, identifying them as “where we gonna put the bank,” “where we gonna put the Kroger,” etc.

When a reporter asked where the citizens of the putative Georgia City would live, Walker said, “Georgia City, of course!” When the question was clarified, Walker said the residents of the new state capitol would be “little tiny peoples I see in my dreams who live together like mice in a storybook.”

Shortly after the press conference the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle reported that the person currently listed as the owner of the property, Walter Harlen Winchell, said he had not been contacted by Walker or his staff, though he would “sell ‘em the land if the price is right and I see the money in my hand.” Contacted by the reporter who broke the story, Walker said he would find Winchell and the reporter and “blow they damn brains out,” then called back fifteen minutes later to say the reporter had actually been talking to one of his “bad personalities” who “I thought I got locked up but he got out,” and pleaded with the reporter not to print the story, adding “I got brain damage real bad.”

After the Chronicle ran its story, the Walker campaign announced that “‘I got brain damage real bad’ is just a playful joke that football legends like to share and that as a football legend Herschel has shared with his many football legend friends over the years, as any real football fans would know” The campaign added that the reporter had “outsmarted himself” and that it was distributing 1,000 “I Got Brain Damage Real Bad for Herschel” campaign souvenir badges to promote it as a slogan.

“Nothing could more clearly show the difference between our campaign and that of the know-it-all elitist Democrat candidate,” Gus Wallow said.