IDIOT OF THE YEAR No. 1: Herschel Walker

2022 is the yr Herschel Walker rebranded himself as a generational IDIOT OF THE YEAR expertise. There had been glimpses earlier than, however he showcased his full-range of idiocy in 2022. Every week, the previous UGA and NFL working again humiliated himself in pursuit of energy and affect he appeared to don’t have any plans to yield it for, past the sheer ambition of all of it. He repeatedly doubled down on his unlucky President Camacho imitation underneath the extraordinary microscope of working for one among Georgia’s Senate seats, watched his personal son flip in opposition to him, then misplaced (twice, technically, if you happen to embrace the runoff) and returned to a private life left in shambles.

Recruited to run for Raphael Warnock’s Georgia senate seat because the token black candidate in Donald Trump’s obsequious rogues’ gallery of unelectable election-denying candidates, Walker was among the many worst of the worst. In the event you lumped collectively a scouting report of the most important Trump-backed losers to run for workplace through the current election cycle, none boast Walker’s collective lousiness.

He’d terrorized his ex-wife, alienated the one son he acknowledged the existence of — denigrating his seems to be and intelligence — called his then-wife’s genes terrible, probably ran afoul of a number of tax laws throughout his marketing campaign, and was thought to be a shameless and obvious habitual liar to his personal marketing campaign staffers. Nonetheless, what’s regarding is that these traits might have been what whisked him by a GOP major so simply he didn’t even present up at debates so long as he brown-nosed Trump. And that’s simply the preamble to his agonizingly duff normal election efficiency artwork.

He represented himself to be a born-again Christian, but hid a number of kids born out of wedlock a long time aside from his personal marketing campaign and has reportedly been an absentee father to his kids. These revelations emerged not lengthy after he railed in opposition to fatherless black kids. In his fervor to skewer African-Individuals to attraction for help from a conservative white voting bloc that bristles at any examination of its personal a long time of bigotry, he denied the existence of systemic racism. That function was instrumental to the Walker marketing campaign.

Over a summer season through which a conservative Supreme Court docket repealed the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, Herschel Walker had the gall to suggest insane whole abortion bans. Walker did this whereas presumably figuring out that the ladies whose abortions he’d paid for would hear this. Ultimately, that’s precisely what occurred as two women came forward with receipts within the type of checks to blast his blatant hypocrisy.

As a campaigner, Walker was a dud. His oratorical expertise had been akin to a fifth grader explaining Cloud Atlas. He compared his résumé to Barack Obama’s with no trace of sarcasm and his coverage experience was in fictional fairy tale creatures. Throughout the run-off, Walker fixated on attacking the transgender group and ultimately was given chaperones throughout media appearances to maintain him from sticking his foot into his personal mouth.

Issues obtained so dire for the Walker marketing campaign that the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Georgia publicly expressed his incapacity to to vote for “one of many worst candidates” in GOP historical past. Walker earned his place in infamy and burrowed again beneath the rock he climbed out of, however not earlier than embarrassing the state of Georgia all through 2022.