Former football player Herschel Walker explained on “Fox & Friends” yesterday that Barack Obama has no grounds to criticize Walker’s fitness for the job of US senator, because Obama hasn’t really done much of anything himself apart from being president of the United States, a job where he only hung out with celebrities all the time anyway. And to be fair, the guy who endorsed Walker’s Senate bid certainly proved that literally any idiot can become president, as long as you aren’t too picky about how that idiot does the job.
Here’s the clip, in which host Brian Kilmeade offered Walker the chance to beclown himself in reaction to comments Obama made Friday while campaigning in Georgia for incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D).
During that campaign event, Obama recalled that Walker had been a “heck of a football player,” but asked, “Does that make him the best person to represent you in the US Senate? Does that make him equipped to weigh in on the critical decisions about our economy and our foreign policy and our future?”
In other remarks not included in the Fox clip, Obama suggested that Walker just plain didn’t have any of the qualities you’d want in a public servant, at least if you’re a dumb nerd who thinks government requires “skills” or “knowledge” or “basic awareness of how law and government work.”
“There is very little evidence that he has taken any interest, bothered to learn anything about or displayed any kind of inclination towards public service or volunteer work or helping people in anyway,” Mr Obama said.
The former president also addressed what he called Mr Walker’s “issues of character” and “habit of not telling the truth.” He also referenced a recent gaffe made by Mr Walker during a recent debate, calling the candidate “someone who carries around a phony badge and says he is in law enforcement like a kid playing cops and robbers.”
Ignoring even the criticisms Obama had made in the short excerpt about Walker’s qualifications, Kilmeade suggested that Obama had been unfair in “going after” Walker since he’d never even met Walker, and asked Walker to comment on Obama’s comment that Walker was a “celebrity that wants to be a politician.”
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Walker wasn’t about to take that crap from a mere constitutional law professor and state legislator who went on to serve in the Senate and the Oval Office, no he was not: “I never met him before, and if I’m a celebrity I would have met him because all he did was hang out with celebrities.” How true. Eight years of not doing anything, as long as you leave out restructuring much of the health insurance market, and greatly expanding the number of Americans who have coverage, plus joining the Paris Climate Agreement and getting Iran to stop work on its nuclear weapons program. And those all sucked! Mostly, though, it was just Hip Hop BBQs that didn’t create jobs.
Walker noted that Obama really should have told the crowd at the Warnock event the same lie that Walker likes to lie about all the time, complaining that Obama
forgot to tell people I created one of the largest minority-owned food service companies in the US, so I do sign the front of a check, which he’s probably never done except when he was in the White House and that Senator Warnock has never done either.
The Daily Beast pointed out that while the Fortune 500 has only featured 19 Black CEOs ever, not a single one of them was Herschel Walker, and that Walker also “does not appear in a list of the largest 100 black-owned businesses in the country, maintained by Black Enterprise magazine.” In fact, even the smallest food companies on the list are far larger than Renaissance Man Foods, the company Walker’s talking about.
By the Black Enterprise list, Walker’s company isn’t even the largest Black-owned food company in Georgia. That would be Smyrna-based TME Enterprises, 68th on the list with more than 680 employees and $40.7 million in revenue.
The AP reported in July that when Walker’s company got a PPP loan during the pandemic, it had only eight employees.
So yeah, Barack Obama definitely left all that out! What else? Walker explained that, also unlike Obama or Warnock, he has “served on a publicly traded board,” and done many other things outside football, like pay for abortions — no, he didn’t say that, but I bet neither Obama nor Warnock have done that either.
“Put my résumé against his résumé, I’d put it up any time of the day, and I think I’ve done well,” Walker bragged, closing with the super impressive point that Barack Obama isn’t even able to vote in Georgia. That’s true of Walker’s biggest backer, Donald Trump, but that’s different, because we bet Donald Trump would be happy to vote in Georgia anyway.
So you really have to admit that, compared to all the things that Herschel Walker has lied about on his his résumé, the stuff Obama has actually done really doesn’t measure up.
[Independent / Daily Beast / AP]
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