Did you have the honor of watching the Georgia debates?
If the SNL staff writers are currently being paid anything at all it’s like paying an infant for needing a diaper change. It’s like stealing money.
Jon Osroff debated an empty podium as sitting Senator Perdue chose to skip the opportunity to make his case to his fellow Georgians lest he have to answer the inevitable deluge of questions regarding his abuse of his position to game the stock market. It’s stunning to consider that giving his opponent an unopposed platform was his best strategy when compared to facing his constituents and answering for the same crimes others have served prison time for, and he was excused of.
You would be forgiven if it reminded you of the Clint Eastwood stunt at the GOP convention when he debated an empty chair, the difference of course being that the missing person in the case of Perdue had been given the opportunity to defend himself, but declined. Eastwood just unapologetically stacked the deck. Much of what Osoff said will be forgotten, if not all, as the lasting image of him standing behind a podium next to one that was unoccupied said volumes.
The other contest had its own challenges. Two political neophytes faced off and displayed their unique weaknesses. They met their challenges differently but in the end it would be a contest for voter turn out, not voter turn on.
Democratic hopeful Rev. Rafael Warnock repeatedly brought up his opponent’s clear breeches of ethical conduct involving, again, stock manipulations and questioned her allegiances, asking if the unelected sitting Senator Kelly Loeffler supported the President’s efforts to overturn the election or rather the Georgia Governor’s efforts to follow state law as prescribed by the state’s constitution. She never answered either query, instead describing her opponent as a “radical liberal” fourteen times and falling back on a robotic repetition of stump rhetoric. She appeared to be embodying a less literate Ann Coulter on valium, her eyes vacant and wearing a tired grin as if this whole exercise was a terrible inconvenience. Her performance was that of a failed candidate for student council.
The Pastor also did his best to avoid accusations that he had denigrated the police and had sought to block an investigation into child abuse at a church camp he had run 20 years ago. All charges were dropped three months after his arrest and apologies came from the prosecutor at the time, calling the affair a “miscommunication”. Warnock dismissed Loeffler’s attacks as knowingly false, intentional misrepresentations of the story for political effect. He, too, then fell back on familiar territory, repeating campaign speech particles, but with a more human touch. More homey, less Stepford. His experience from the pulpit helped him on a performance level, allowing those willing to excuse the minimal substance to gain solace.
The races remain tight at the time of this writing. Investigative reporter Greg Palast has directed his considerable skills to restoring the voting rights to 200k Georgians who had been unlawfully purged and it is these kinds of efforts that are the key to Senate power. No minds will be changed in this election, to voters swayed. That ship has sailed. All that is left is who shows up, and who is allowed to.
It isn’t entirely clear who’s side the Trump administration is on. In a rally held in Atlanta on Wednesday, former campaign attorney Sidney Powell demanded that the Republican voters stay home, that the compromised election was not worthy of their vote until certain voting measures were changed, continuing the canard of a rigged deck. He was followed by Lin Wood, an attorney that had been part of the failed law suits in the state that were dismissed with prejudice, telling the crazed crowd they should withhold their votes until the election was thrown out and they were allowed a do-over.
All of this was intended to add weight to the argument that, had the election been fair, the President actually won on November 3rd by a landslide, a fire that has been judicially un-lightable. The hope is to somehow find a legal issue credible enough to be considered by the SCOTUS and pray that the fix is sufficiently in at the highest court to throw the contest to the President. A long shot, but not a completely implausible deus ex machina to end democracy in America.
Though I can readily imagine Justice Kavenaugh jetissoning all semblance of judicial integrity (remember his misstatement of Vermont law in his first written opinion), and Justice Barrett seems literally capable of anything, Justice Gorsuch appears less inclined to sacrifice his legitimate claims to legal elite status at the altar of Trump, and it is unlikely the remaining others will be so unhinged as to force the incoming administration’s hand in expanding the court in self defense. A rock solid legal case would be necessary to lead the court off the cliff of setting the will of the people aside, setting the stage for an insurrection seen only once in this country.
Trump’s selections for the court were spread out across his term, and the longer he was in power, the clearer it became how craven the Senate had become. His picks became more and more unhinged, from the deeply conservative Gorsuch to the unstable Kavenaugh to the ravenous Barrett. The Senate had made it clear that absolutely nothing was off the table and as his administration descended into criminality there was simply no reason for his picks to not follow suit. But it is my impression that his attempt to rig the court may have started just too late, that he won’t have enough suicidal Justices to make the whole game play out.
They won’t take the cases. No matter what happens they have to remain on the court and face the fallout, and they know very well that the people have spoken clearly and the result is not in doubt.
We are all Georgians now.