Roy Moore isn't going anywhere
BY JACK HOLMES
NOV 27, 2017
The campaign of Roy Moore, an accused child predator running to replace Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III in the senate, is an x-ray into the heart of the conservative movement. This movement is not a principled desire for "smaller government," nor a worldview based in the moral framework of Christianity. It is an exercise in protecting white identity, where anything is acceptable — even accusations of sexual misconduct from eight different women — as long as your side wins. If you keep a "liberal Democrat" out of office, and you shore up your Senate majority, you can justify electing a man who one woman said brought her to his house and tried to get her to touch his genitals when he was in his 30s and she was 14 years old ...
The idea that Alabamians would be making a principled decision in voting for Moore, so he can "help Donald Trump pass tax reform" and "build the wall," is beyond parody. The man is an alleged pedophile, but it's worth sending him to the nation's highest legislative body so that he can enshrine our budding plutocracy in the tax code and build a wall along Alabama's southern border to keep illegal immigrants out? ... Alabama is not a border state. But its conservative residents seem very enthusiastic about The Wall. Why would that be? Could it be that The Wall is a symbol of something — say, a reinstatement of racial power dynamics from a bygone era? ...
... Doug Jones, Moore's Democratic opponent, is qualified and has a sterling record as a prosecutor. The idea he is soft on crime is laughable. But in sad fact, the specifics of that record might hurt him in Alabama: Jones convicted the remaining Ku Klux Klan members who, in an act of domestic terrorism, bombed a church in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement, killing four little girls attending Sunday school. That makes Jones one of those who is trying to upend the traditional order in Alabama. It makes him an ally of the Other, whose agenda must be opposed by constructing The Wall ... It doesn't matter what Moore is accused of ...
This does not have to be the next chapter for the conservative movement. Things do not need to culminate with a Republican electorate driving a man to the United States Senate who was banned from the local mall because he was creeping around, hitting on Santa's helpers. Republicans do not need to elevate someone whom a local police officer said she was told to keep away from the cheerleaders at high school football games. They do not need to cast their votes for a man who readily admits he found his wife "eight years" after ogling her at a teen dance recital when she was 15 years old, or who told Sean Hannity he always dated girls "with their mothers' permission" — a claim that tells you all you need to know, but which still isn't true ...
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a13935636/roy-moore-strategist-defend-video/
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