A hatchet job.

You have to figure supporters of Georgia sixth district congressional candidate Karen Handel are really freaked out by the possibility of her losing this traditionally Republican district to Democratic phenom Jon Ossoff in the special runoff election June 20. Otherwise they probably would not have so instantly tried to smear Ossoff via a nonexistent association with newly toxic comedian Kathy Griffin.

Paul Ryan’s Congressional Leadership Fund has already run a bunch of ads depicting Ossoff as a stooge of Nancy Pelosi, and the soul mate of godless, military-hating, tax-raising San Francisco hippies. But compared to the latest ad, those were as reasoned and substantive as a C-Span book forum. Check it out:

Griffin, before her career-curtailing (if not career-ending) video making a very poor joke about Donald Trump, tweeted her support for Ossoff. She has not contributed to his campaign or come within a thousand miles of Georgia, best as anyone can tell. Yet he’s lumped in with her, along with images of Michael Moore and sundry window-breaking, car-burning, trashcan-spilling anarchists, as “angry liberals” who “have gone too far” in their determination to foist Ossoff on the clean-living suburbanites of the sixth district. The fact that Ossoff has nothing to do with any of these people— certainly not violent anarchists who actually hate liberals, angry or not, more than anyone — does not matter to these purveyors of the Big Smear.

Griffin, of course, has abjectly apologized for her Trump-beheaded video, which has been denounced by Ossoff and every other Democratic pol within range of a microphone. Indeed, as Ossoff himself pointed out, Republicans are being stone hypocrites for simultaneously denouncing the image Griffin created as disturbing to children and then disseminating it again in their own attack ads.

If the idea is that the mild-mannered, centrist candidate Ossoff is responsible for everything said or done by everyone supporting him — plus everyone on the left whether they support him or not — that’s certainly a standard that no politician could survive, least of all Donald Trump.