Congratulations to Georgia state Rep. Jason Spencer, who has succeeded where so, so many racists before him have failed: embarrassing the Republican Party to the point of being forced out.
Spencer handed in his resignation days after Showtime aired a clip of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show Who Is America?, in which Spencer screams the N-word repeatedly, pulls down his pants and backs his raw ass into Cohen’s face while saying, “I’ll touch you, I’ll make you a homosexual, drop that gun!”, imitates an Asian accent, and threatens to torture “sandniggers” from the Middle East. The video is...a lot.
Spencer, nearly an eight-year state rep, managed to hang onto his position despite physically threatening a former Democratic black colleague over the removal of Confederate monuments last year. He lost the May primary and would have remained in office until January, but has begrudgingly resigned after Georgia Republican leaders pressured him to leave. His last day in office is July 31.
He apologized for the “ridiculously ugly episode,” but more or less blamed Cohen, who posed as an Israeli terrorism expert filming an anti-terrorism training video, for things that he said and did voluntarily. “Sacha Baron Cohen and his associates took advantage of my paralyzing fear that my family would be attacked,” he told the AJC. (I love this explanation, as it confirms that Spencer truly believes flashing his butt and yelling racial and homophobic epithets are effective ways of disarming an armed terrorist.)
Perhaps the most satisfying part of Spencer’s downfall, though, is that that he was just a few months away from receiving subsidized healthcare for life. Instead, he will have to scrape by on health insurance coverage that his own party is trying to decimate.