By Douglas Andrews..

Someone — we’re not sure who — once said that a dog can have ticks and fleas, the point being that the one doesn’t preclude the other. Similarly, Stacey Abrams can be a liar and a cheat.

And, sure enough, she is.

Recall that Abrams soiled herself earlier this month when she pressured Major League Baseball, whose annual All-Star Game was to be played in Atlanta this year, to denounce as racist Georgia’s newly passed voting reform law and to instead support the Democrats’ pro-fraud HR 1 bill, which would loosen and federalize election laws in all 50 states. And recall that Abrams’s pressure campaign backfired, as MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred took his All-Star Game and his $100 million and skedaddled from partisan Atlanta, which is majority-black, to peaceful Denver, which is 76% white. Oops.

Abrams then did what Democrats always do: She blamed Republicans for what she herself was guilty of. “Georgia Republicans,” she tweeted, “must renounce the terrible damage they have caused to our voting system and the harm they have inflicted on our economy.”

It was a diabolical piece of misdirection, and now we’re learning just what lengths she and her mainstream media stooges have gone to in order to cover her dirty tracks. As Fox News’s Joseph Wulfsohn reports, “USA Today is facing intense backlash for allowing prominent Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams to retroactively make changes to a March 31 op-ed that watered-down her support for boycotts after Major League Baseball (MLB) moved its All-Star game out of Atlanta days later.”

Got that? USA Today allowed Abrams to retroactively edit an op-ed in which she’d expressed support for the pro-boycott position that ultimately cost her state $100 million.

Here’s the smoking gun, the self-incriminating passage from Abrams’s original USA Today op-ed: “The impassioned response to the racist, classist bill that is now the law of Georgia is to boycott in order to achieve change. Events hosted by major league baseball, world class soccer, college sports and dozens of Hollywood films hang in the balance. At the same time, activists urge Georgians to swear off of hometown products to express our outrage. Until we hear clear, unequivocal statements that show Georgia-based companies get what’s at stake, I can’t argue with an individual’s choice to opt for their competition.”

“The impassioned response,” wrote Abrams, “is to boycott in order to achieve change.”

But in her surreptitiously revised version, Abrams wrote, “Boycotts invariably cost jobs.” And she wrote, “Instead of a boycott, I strongly urge other events and productions to do business in Georgia and speak out against our law and similar proposals in other states.”

As a liar and a cheater, then, Abrams is in good company with USA Today, a leftist rag with a notoriously biased “fact-check” apparatus. But it’s one thing for a news organ to be biased and another thing entirely for it to be downright deceitful — which USA Today is. As National Review’s Ryan Mills points out, “According to the Internet Archive, Abrams’s piece was updated the afternoon of April 6, but an editor’s note acknowledging the changes wasn’t added for over two weeks, on April 22.”

So USA Today allowed Abrams to edit her piece on the sly until the furor had died down, and only weeks later came clean with a buried note to its readership.

And the media wonder why we call them “Fake News.”

Former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler summed it up pretty well. “Stacey Abrams called for boycotts of Georgia,” she tweeted, “then when the MLB fell for her lies, she tried to rewrite her own words and cover it up with help from USA TODAY. Now, hardworking Georgians are set to lose $100 million — and they know exactly who’s to blame.”

Stacey Abrams, that’s who.