With friends like these . . .

First it was Sonny Perdue whining about a headline the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran in the wake of Georgia's bizarre loss to Tennessee in 2006.

A year later, Georgia's Republican-controlled state legislature decided it was going to stick its nose into the world of college football by passing a resolution calling for a college football playoff, not coincidentally a couple months after the 10-2 Georgia Bulldogs were denied a berth in the BCS national title game.

Now, mere days after the expatriate University of Florida alumni community in Georgia followed all the proper legal channels and got UF vanity plates approved by the state Department of Revenue, Georgia's Republican legislators are threatening to yank the tags if Florida's state lege doesn't reciprocate with a Georgia alumni tag.

Look, I've known for a long time that the Georgia state legislature is loaded with complete retards. I was but an apple-cheeked boy of 15 when my AP U.S. history class took a field trip up to Atlanta to watch the state House in session, and when we got back, I wrote, and the rest of the class signed, a lengthy editorial for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer detailing just what a petty, vindictive, ineffectual monkey cage we had sitting underneath the Golden Dome. And it didn't take long to figure out that Sonny Perdue was no prize, either -- yeah, he may have been a walk-on at UGA, but he apparently doesn't even think Georgians can be trusted with the choice of whether to buy alcohol on Sundays or not.

But this latest wave of douchebaggery, as in-character as it may be, is on another plane of embarrassing, because now they're dragging Bulldog Nation into it. Just for the record, hardly any of us Bulldog fans cared what headline the AJC used after that Tennessee loss. We were miffed that Georgia got passed over for a national-title shot, but not enough to want politicians to start regulating college football. And we certainly couldn't give a rat's ass what kind of license plates people put on their cars, particularly since we have the simple rejoinder "42-30" to any UF grad who starts bragging about his Gator tag. But every time Georgia's legions of ass-witted politicians picks some dumb new way to trumpet their love for the Dawgs, it gets headlines all over the place and people all over the country shake their heads at what thin-skinned little bitches we must be.

The Georgia state government has turned into the overbearing parent who storms into the principal's office demanding to know why their kid got a B instead of an A on his term paper, who picks a fight with the coach of the Little League team because his little angel isn't in the starting lineup; meanwhile, the kid is just sitting there looking for a hole he can crawl into, wishing that Mom and Dad would just shut the f%$# up and stop embarrassing him in front of his friends.

Obviously, as someone who doesn't live in Georgia anymore, I don't have as close a connection to the state government as I might, so I don't know why they've spent the last 17 months on this Defend-the-Bulldogs kick. I'm sure a lot of them went to UGA, so maybe they feel like this is their way of sticking up for their alma mater. But to me, it just looks like a lot of dumbass, not-particularly-clever pandering. You think it's any coincidence Sonny threw his hissy fit over the AJC headline just a few weeks before he was up for re-election?

Again, I don't live in Georgia, so I can't speak on behalf of Georgians. But I can speak on behalf of Georgia fans. So Georgia state legislature, I'd like to respectfully ask that you cut this shit out. You're not scoring points with Bulldog Nation; you're just making us look like pussies. And considering that you've already got a drought and a state full of failing schools to deal with, perhaps you should deal with that before indulging your petty get-backs.

Mark Richt and the Dawgs were doing just fine before you started shitting unsolicited bricks on their behalf. They'll do just fine afterward. Holster your legislative guns and quit meddling in their business, or we're going to start seeking out cars with "state legislator" license plates in Athens on game day and keying them to within an inch of their lives.

(A belated hat tip to Senator Blutarsky.)