Republican tool Paul Ryan came to Atlanta yesterday to campaign for Congressional candidate Karen Handel, who is in a well-publicized runoff election against Democrat Jon Ossoff to win the seat vacated by Trump's selection of Tom Price for Secretary of Health and Human Services. As patriotic Americans, we need this election to go to Ossoff, not just to pick up a Democratic seat in the House and not just to infuriate The Donald, but also to block Handel's continued political ambitions.
We here at the Politics Desk of Water Dissolves Water have been ranting about Handel for a while now, attempting to warn an unsuspecting nation of the dangers she represents. Way back in 2009, we pointed out that as Secretary of State, Handel considered suing the Justice Department to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. In a press release, Handel claimed "We have evidence that non-citizens have voted in past Georgia elections, and that more than 2,100 individuals have attempted to register." No such evidence existed or was ever presented.
In 2010, she tried to run for Governor, fortunately unsuccessfully, even though she got an endorsement from none other than Mama Bear Sarah Palin. Back then, we noted that her "signature accomplishment was passing a controversial photo-ID requirement for voting, a measure considered by many to discourage mainly poor and minority voters, and much of her political career has been built around the virtually non-existent issue of 'voter fraud'.”
The next day, we noted that with the Palin endorsement locked down, Handel was proclaiming herself as the true-blood conservative in the race, while her opponents in the race were painting her as some sort of baby-killing, sodomite liberal - while running for office early in her career in relatively liberal Fulton County, she had endorsed gay/lesbian rights and once made a small contribution to the Log Cabin Republicans, and she got booty-blasted by Georgia's influential right-to-life lobby for supporting a rape-and-incest exception to a hypothetical abortion ban and for opposing sharp restrictions on in vitro fertility clinics.
As the primary season continued, Handel's opponents continued to define themselves as the true conservatives in the race, and framed the run-off campaign as being conservatives (them) versus non-conservatives (her). Handel was the only Republican candidate in the primary not endorsed by the Georgia Right to Life PAC and as we noted in late July 2010, Melanie Crozier, the PAC's director, wrote an article in Politico that claimed that Handel's endorser, Sarah Palin, "has a son with Down syndrome, and under Karen Handel’s laws, Handel would have felt like it was OK to go in and abort that child."
It was ugly, and Handel lost the primary to her Republican opponent, Nathan Deal, who went on to become a two-term Governor of Georgia, and she seemed to fade from the spotlight until 2012, when it became apparent that in the intervening years Handel had somehow become a new Senior Policy Advisor for the Susan B. Komen Foundation, and that she had directed the breast-cancer charity to cut off all of its funding for cancer screening to Planned Parenthood. That turned into a public-relations fiasco of the highest order and ultimately resulted in Handel's resignation. Of course, she claimed that she was the real victim in the dust-up, and wrote a book called Planned Bullyhood or some other such nonsense.
As we noted here in 2012, one fairly obvious motive for trying to insert a cancer charity into an abortion-rights controversy was that she had wanted to develop some "pro-life" credentials to compensate for the Achilles' heel that had cost her a shot at the Governor race. Under this theory, we noted, "the chilling possibility that she may run again, whether for Georgia Governor in 2014 or for some other office, must be considered." And now, here we are in 2017, and she's opportunistically running for an open U.S. Congress seat.
To those of us here at the Politics Desk, Karen Handel is like a booger on the finger that we just can't shake off. After enduring her tenure as Secretary of State, we thought we were rid of her until she popped up in the Governor's race, and then following that defeat, we thought she was gone until the Susan B. Komen affair. While we had our suspicions, it seemed like there was no coming back from that disaster, but now here she is, once again, trying to represent us in Congress.
If you need any more proof of her unfitness for national office, look at the very racist meme above posted on Twitter by her husband. Not only is it brazenly stereotypical and condescending, but it's also ironic that the woman who launched her career trying to suppress minorities' rights to vote is now trying to claim that she's the one who will "free" them from the "plantation."
The Ossoff-Handel election is on June 20th. I can't vote - I live in John Lewis' 5th Congressional District, not the contested 6th - but if you're in the 6h District and/or you have some money to contribute to Jon, then by all means please vote for Ossoff and/or contribute to his campaign.
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