There may not be a more vapid politician in America than Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler. I realize that is a bold statement, given the competition, but there's a strong case to be made.
HuffPost uses Loeffler's smiling meet-and-greet with white supremacist leader Chester Doles this week to point out that that Loeffler has made a habit of meeting with white supremacists, anti-Semites, and neo-Nazi sympathizers. The wealthy but almost-comically inexperienced Loeffler insists, through her camp, that she of course didn't know who Doles was, and that this was just the usual pictures with fans that all politicians engage in, you can't vet everybody, and so forth.
That would hold some weight except that, as HuffPost observes, this isn't even close to the first time this has happened, and many of Loeffler's other little meetups with white supremacists can't be written off by the campaign with the same gosh, how do all these violence-peddling far-right thugs keep showing up next to our candidate shrug.
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Loeffler fully knew who racist conspiracy-peddling candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene was, and the pair engaged in pro-gun self-promotion. No matter how incompetent Loeffler may be, there's still no bloody way Loeffler does not know what the "3 percent" militia movement is, or their racist obsessions.
This also wasn't the first time Doles, who leads the white supremacist group American Patriots USA, had met Loeffler.
A man bearing a large shield with the name of a hate group on it, and who claims his group provided "security" protecting Loeffler from Black Lives Matter activists, is not exactly the random bystander Loeffler's ever-cynical and dishonest staff is trying to play him off as.
In the end, though, HuffPost's most solid confirmation that Kelly Loeffler indeed has been courting the anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi elements of the far right was that she herself sat down for and publicly promoted an interview with OAN conspiracy host Jack Posobiec, of "Pizzagate" fame. Posobiec is an infamous would-be mainstreamer of white supremacist and neo-Nazi messages and causes, so notorious as to be the subject of numerous Southern Poverty Law Center reports. Even if they were all born in a cave, and yesterday, there is not a chance in hell that Loeffler and her staff did not know who Posobiec was when groveling to his pro-Trump conspiracy-peddling pseudonetwork.
This was Loeffler intentionally courting the racist far-right, as southern Republicans have done for decades while attempting to dodge consequences. This was Loeffler cynically attempting to enlist the pro-Trump conspiracy base, the QAnon adherents and the most shameless hoax-promoters, as her own advocates. And it was yet another of Loeffler's specific efforts to portray the Black Lives Matter movement, not the armed far-right or the con-artist hoaxers that sent an armed man looking for a basement sex dungeon in a basement-less and unremarkable pizza parlor, as the real danger to the nation.
So she's a race-baiting little snot, is what I'm saying, a huckster eager to staple herself to the violent far right's visions of imminent race wars and whatever other conspiracy theories she can attach herself to, knowing full well that there's a base of ultra-racist Georgia conservatives just waiting to be scooped up and poured into voting booths so long as you can tell them a few scary stories of Black people, Jews, and Socialists coming to do them nebulous harm.
Loeffler can't defend herself from that charge, because it is her campaign schtick. It is her only campaign schtick: woodenly delivered, pre-memorized one-liners about "socialism" blurted out as confusing non-responses to whatever question was just asked is her debate and rally staple. Have you actually heard Loeffler debate or answer reporter questions? She makes Donald Trump look like a philosopher. She's a Polit-O-Tron, a robot programmed with whatever pared-down talking points her staff can insert into her limited memory banks, non of it particularly believed but all of it focused at taking advantage of the con of the moment.
That, then, is where my claim that Kelly Loeffler is the most vapid politico in America comes from. There is no plausible argument that Loeffler doesn't know she's cozying up to far-right militias, neo-Nazi propaganda peddlers, hoaxers, and her state's most notorious racists as she echos claims that come directly from their own mouths. There is a plausible argument to be made that she doesn't actually give a damn about any of it one way or another, and is simply doing whatever her hired archconservative strategists are telling her to do.
When faced with a once-in-a-century worldwide pandemic, Loeffler's only notable response was to quickly shift her own stock holdings into companies that would benefit from required mass shutdowns. It was that and, to date, absolutely nothing else. This is not a person who gives a damn about any issue, no matter how life-endangering or enormous. If she later moves to some other state where the racism doesn't play as well she may well attempt to reinvent herself as anti-racist crusader. Whatever keeps her in office. Whatever keeps her in the halls of power, able to tweak things specifically to benefit her own holdings.
This isn't Sen. Mitch McConnell, a man whose nihilism is aimed at entrenching Republican power regardless of what the actual voters have to say about it. Loeffler is not a party booster. Loeffler is a Loeffler booster.
That's probably how her staff needs to respond to these racist-boosting meet and greets. Not by denying that they know who these shield-bearing white supremacist freaks and conspiracy hucksters are and what they stand for, but by pointing out that their candidate is simply to shallow a person to grasp the dangers of any of it. Oooh, is fomenting armed rebellion against the United States in order to purge non-whites bad? My goodness, we had no idea.
Or not. I'm not her keeper, and I don't care. But her claims that she is not aligning herself with the racist far right are bullshit, provably bullshit, and her little collection of paid-for hacks isn't fooling anyone with their claims of innocence.
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