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The Georgia GOP’s Circular Firing Squad

So hey, Republicans, what did you expect? Loyalty? From Trump?

It’s amazing that you still don’t get it. With Trump, loyalty goes one way. You give him unquestioned loyalty. He gives you unending abuse. You do his bidding. He pins his crimes on you. You throw away whatever reputation you may have once had. He throws you under the bus. And rolls back over you in reverse.

And that’s what you get for living in a fantasy world of grift for four years, then landing with a thud in that annoying real world.

Just ask Kelly Loeffler. Just ask David Perdue. Just ask Brian Kemp.

We’re talking Georgia, where the stakes are high and the odds are long, and isn’t it sweet to see slimy Republicans rolling in the mud, tripping over each other to see who can be the worst parody of a slimy Republican.

Two senators and a governor. All three need to answer a basic but existential question about the January runoff:

How do you go all in for Trump when he’s telling your voters not to vote?

Trump — the very guy you’ve spent four years wading in slime for — doesn’t think you’re good enough for his voters. Talk about a low bar.

Not that slime doesn’t come naturally to all of them.

Kelly Loeffler is the richest person in the Senate. She and her husband built a multi-billion-dollar financial services empire, and she owns the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA, where she’s roundly detested by her players.

In the spirit of grabbing much too much, she engaged in a bit of insider trading back in February. She used a Senate briefing to get an early jump on the coronavirus crisis — you know, that hoax from China that doesn’t exist — and apparently made a bundle. Her bundles are bigger than ours.

As for campaign messaging, the best dirt she can come up with to throw at Rafael Warnock — besides the usual “socialist agenda” nonsense — is an ad she ran featuring an old grainy clip of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of all people. Remember him?

So does Obama. It’s the famous clip of Wright preaching “God damn America,” which in 2008 was taken grotesquely out of context and used by Republicans to bludgeon Obama. He still has the scars.

Now it’s been recycled, deftly edited, and fashioned into this scorching message: “Warnock defended Jeremiah Wright’s hatred, then gave him an award for truth-telling.”

One is tempted to ask if that’s the best Kelly can do? But depressingly, her constituency of reprogrammable goobers probably eats that up, a reminder of the good old days when they had a Black president from Kenya to make fun of.

Now, if only Kelly could get Trump to stop reprogramming those very goobers, who are now being told to skip this runoff.

But enough about Kelly. Let’s talk about Dave Perdue.

Remember blind trusts? Those quaint things senators (and presidents) used to put their financial assets into so as not to appear corrupt? Dave never set one up. He doesn’t mind appearing corrupt.

He’s almost as rich as Kelly, and like Kelly he has his own history of sleaze, including the highly suspect sale of the Dollar General store chain, the lawsuits from which he had to settle with a $40 million payout. It would’ve been called fraud, but he bought his way out of it. Cheaply.

And just like Kelly, he also sold stock based on the coronavirus briefings they both received as senators, courtesy of my fellow taxpayers. And by the way, insider trading is a criminal charge, and relatively easy to prove. The records of the stock sales are public, and Dave made a lot of stock sales. Just another project for our new Attorney General.

But for now, Dave shares with Kelly this bizarre world where you don’t know which asses to kick and which to kiss. Trump has turned the Georgia Republican party inside out, with nutjob lawyer Sidney Powell screaming that the state’s whole election system is flagrantly rigged.

Which puts Dave in an awkward position. He has to convince his voters that the November election was both rigged and not rigged. If he says it was rigged, he risks a drastically low turnout of goobers. But if he says it wasn’t rigged — which, need I say, it was not — there’s Trump telling those same goobers to not bother voting.

But the punching bag in all this — the guy who’s taking it from all sides — is the governor, Brian Kemp. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. His theft of the Georgia governor’s race from Stacey Abrams is still fresh in our minds, and it must be deeply gratifying for Abrams to watch Sidney Powell call Kemp a Chinese Agent, while the MAGA crowd chants “Lock him up.”

Brian’s also getting it from his own den of Georgia thieves, with both Dave and Kelly demanding his resignation. The strategy behind this is unclear.

It would all be just delicious, if only I had any confidence of winning those  senate seats. But this is Georgia.

Interestingly, Trump seems to have convinced himself that by flipping Georgia he somehow wins the election. Yes, Georgia was fairly close — 13,000 votes or so — but no amount of shenanigans will ever overcome that deficit, short of relocating Atlanta to South Carolina. And even if he does somehow flip Georgia, he’s not even close in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. He still thinks the courts and Rudy Giuliani will bail him out, which is beyond delusional.

What he seems to be doing is trying to cement his fabled base — to bind the goobers to him for all time. He wants permanent access to their hearts and wallets.

It’s a scam I don’t think he can sustain. Once out of power, Trump will be a sad thing for the goobers to see, and while they may never accept his defeat, they’ll eventually find another charlatan to fleece them.

But for now, Trump is doing real damage to his own party. Let’s take a moment to savor that.

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