For a glimpse into what an almighty scam Republican politics have become, look no further than Kelly Loeffler. The senator from Georgia bills herself in her Twitter bio as a "political outsider," because that's just a thing you say now. No matter that Loeffler did not rise to power on the back of some grassroots movement. She wasn't even elected. She was appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a real peach of a public official in his own right, after Senator Johnny Isakson retired citing health reasons. In a strange coincidence, Loeffler and her husband had donated around $3.2 million to various political committees, the vast majority of them Republican, before she was chosen. Oh, and that husband? He's the CEO of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. But in America today, even big-money donors placed in their positions by powerful politicians can call themselves Political Outsiders and nobody even laughs.

They really should, though. Loeffler deserves to be laughed at. Because even after she was caught selling off millions in stock following a closed-door Senate briefing on coronavirus from Dr. Anthony Fauci and other administration public-health officials in January, she's got the nerve to spout off about American Values. (Loeffler claims she does not direct trades for her stock portfolio and that she did not trade on non-public information. For this, you'll have to take her word for it. One thing to consider is that following the briefing, all but two of her trades were sales. For one of those purchases, she bought stock in a company that makes teleworking software.) Here's Loeffler on the Tweet Machine Wednesday, railing against the Socialist Menace on the occasion of Bernie Sanders's withdrawal from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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.@BernieSanders may not appear on the ballot in November, but the last four years have made it clear that his radical socialist ideas will be. We must continue our fight against the radical left and keep America a place of freedom, hope, and individual liberty. — Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) April 8, 2020

Say what you want about the tenets of "radical socialism," Dude, but at least Bernie Sanders wasn't playing the stock market at such a convenient time—all while assuring the public that coronavirus posed no serious threat to Americans' health or way of life. That's another part of this: Loeffler and her fellow Savvy Stock Traders, like Richard Burr of North Carolina, spent January and February downplaying the pandemic threat while selling off their stock holdings. And this was at a time when the president and his allies were trumpeting the strength of the American economy and encouraging everybody to ride that bull market. Why would you sell off your holdings at a time like that?

It's a mystery for sure. Maybe Loeffler should take a back seat for a while until we get all this figured out. (She has now pledged to liquidate her stock holdings, a gracious move now that those gains are locked in.) At the moment, she's pretty much an advertisement for all of socialism's most biting critiques of capitalism. The argument that Medicare For All poses more of a threat to American Values than cronyism and corruption is not a strong one. Actually, maybe Loeffler should keep talking. One thing this pandemic has exposed is that having your health insurance tied to your employment is not a recipe for "freedom, hope, and individual liberty." It chains you to your job and leaves you shit out of luck if you get laid off amid an economic cataclysm.

We should not underestimate our ability to learn exactly zero lessons here, though. After all, odds are decent that Georgia could choose to elect Kelly Loeffler as a Political Outsider later this year.



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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