I get it, if he’d won he would have been a saddle sore on the GOP’s rear end for every day he was in the Senate.
But I couldn’t help hoping last night, when it looked like Jones won, that someone would find a bag of uncounted votes in the trunk of a car, that would put Roy Moore over the top. Just for the Uber Irony Factor.
Is it, as the headlines are screaming, a terrible, horrible loss for Republicans? Hasn’t the MeanStreamMedia figured out that true Republicans aren’t buying their drivel?
Do not believe Leftist drivel from the Media-Democrat Complex.
Roy Moore is not a defeat for the GOP. It was the GOPe that defeated Roy Moore. They actively campaigned against him in the primaries. They campaigned against him in the runoff. They repeated Leftist lies about him during the general. They hate him and they wanted him to lose, long before the Washington Post produced the first of the bimbos.
The sad truth is that the GOP elites in Washington preferred to put a pro-infanticide Marxist in the senate, rather than Judge Roy Moore.
I heard NPR interviewing a “Republican consultant” from inside the beltway, who said that his firm had worked for Luther Strange during the primaries. His key takeaway line was about the voters of Alabama showing that they won’t put up with morally corrupt politicians. He said “When you are accused of being a pedophile, you lose.”
Note that he did not say “If you are a pedophile.”
Note also that Judge Roy Moore was never accused of pedophilia. He was accused of sexual harassment bordering on sexual assault against teenage girls. All of the incidents in the accusations allegedly occurred during dates. None of the allegations include any actual sex or even removal of clothes. If you discount the first one, whose story has been discredited twenty different ways, all the others were 17 or 18 at the time of the alleged incident. So “pedophilia” was never alleged, but this GOP wonk is implying that it was. These GOP swamp creatures have worked hard to repeat the lies of the left, and their efforts succeeded. They encouraged Alabama Republican voters to write in other names on the ballot.
There were more write-in votes cast than the margin of victory of the Democrat.
The Republican Establishment won. Shame on them. They are not conservatives. They are Swamp Creatures of Washington.
I will always believe that that WaPo story originated from inside the office of Mitch McConnell.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/12/12/mitch-mcconnell-is-the-reason-doug-jones-is-a-senator/
Further regarding the allegations against Judge Roy Moore, before we all move on to the next media hoo-rah.
All of the credible allegations date from the period from 1979 through 1983. There are no outstanding allegations of any inappropriate behavior on Judge Moore’s part that date from after the time he first started to date the girl that he married.
(The first, non-believable accusation was alleged to date from 1977.)
A bit of background: I live in Alabama. I vote here in the general (not in primaries after I left the GOP in 2011). So consider this an on-the-ground report.
Roy Moore was popular here. We like Mo Brooks well enough, but he wasn’t as popular as Moore. And we all knew Luther Strange was your typical Business Council Republican, i.e., a guy that would sell us out for the promise of a small increase in his stock dividends. It’s why he was crushed in the primaries. There was zero… ZERO… enthusiasm for Luther Strange. So please, dispense with the “Luther Strange would have won easy”. He might not have, because Doug Jones had an asset unique to a Democrat in Alabama: the “Four Little Girls”.
To understand Alabama politics, you have to understand that the one thing that motivates black voters here is the 60’s. Bull Connor, the Selma Bridge crossing, and the four little girls. The “Civil Rights Era” here is the REAL religion of black Alabama Democrats. They commemorate the Selma Bridge crossing every year in a manner just like a religious ritual. MLK is more like Jesus to them than a political leader.
And the Four Little Girls? They’re the patron saint/martyrs of the faith. They were children killed in a Klan bombing at the 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham. And Doug Jones’ claim to fame is that HE was the prosecutor that, decades later, put the bombers in jail. Imagine a guy that had touched the robes of Jesus running in your local election. That’s the kind devotion Doug Jones draws from voters in the Black Belt in Alabama.
Still, even THAT wouldn’t have given him the numbers he needed if it wasn’t for a combination of the Washington Post, and the feckless cowardice of the Republican Party. After the WaPo ran the hit piece, the NRSC ran like a cowed dog, taking their money with them, while the Democrats, smelling blood, brought in over $40 million in out of state money. I cannot emphasize to you enough just how much Democrats flooded our state with pro Jones/anti-Moore ads, 24/7. TV, radio, Internet, all had “Don’t elect a pedophile!” constantly. I used YouTube a lot, and at one point, I was getting a Jones ad every 10 minutes or so. Democrats ran ads targeted at Republican women saying “You don’t have to tell your husband you voted for Doug Jones”.
And it worked. Barely. Jones got 94+% of Hillary’s turnout from 2016… in a REPLACEMENT election… while Moore got less than half the turnout of Trump’s 2016 numbers… about 46%.
Suburbanite, whitebread Republicans stayed home.
Here’s the irony: they did so assuming Moore would win anyway, and their conscience could be clean of the ick factor by simply sitting the election out. There’s a lot of not-buyer’s remorse right now from people that went to bed when Moore was still leading by 8 points, and woke up to Senator Doug Jones. Their attitude is “Well I was uncomfortable with Moore, but I didn’t want the Democrat to win!”
If you can remember the Massachusetts senate race of 2010… the one to fill out the rest of Dead Kennedy’s term, where Republican Scott Brown won, well, this was Alabama’s version of that race. The minority party snuck up on the majority party, only this time, they did it with the help of the majority party’s feckless leadership.
A small comfort is that like Scott Brown, Doug Jones likely won’t hold this seat longer than the 2 years it has on its term, because Republicans will probably get off their rears and vote in normal numbers next time. It still sucks though.
This election proves that there can never be any real reform from within the GOP. Once a candidate who is not acceptable to the DC establishment is nominated, they will knee cap him/her. Moore’s race isn’t the first one. Think back to the Indiana senate race in 2012. Many people to this day insist that Murdoch’s statement about rape was what did him in. It wasn’t. What did him in was lack of support by the Lugar wing of the Indiana GOP. This is how they operate. It’s time to start a new party. It’s time to infiltrate an existing third party and push our type of people up that way. The GOP is a party of death, its own.
Yes, Robert! A million times over!!!!!! Jonah Goldberg is sadly an idiot. This from a former fan.
I no longer read NR, Jonah, Podhoretz, any of them. NR writer comments on Twitter are as smarmy as any blue-checked leftist today. And indeed, I’ve noticed that French, Goldberg, etc, seem to have more liberal followers now, and conservatives seem to be scarce, at least in their comments. After Against Trump (and dumping Disqus for Facebook comments), NR’s comment section similarly looked more like a Daily Kos thread than the house that Buckley built. That’s why I left Ricochet. I could see they were becoming NeverTrump NR with podcasts. I JOINED Ricochet to support the podcasts years ago. I stopped listening to them almost a year before I left Ricochet. Remember when Mike Murphy was on the flagship podcast years ago and he basically spent an hour calling the Republican base idiot racists? That’s pretty much what the podcasts began to sound like to me on a regular basis.
I’ve taken to calling such people and groups the Cuckold Wing of the GOP. I truly, truly think they enjoy losing “virtuously” more than they do winning with actual conservative voters, like a man that gets a thrill from watching his wife being debased by a more virile man.
Hey, off topic, but briefly, I want to say “hi” Robert.
Yes, me too! Hi Robert!
Hi guys! Sorry I am not very chatty but I am preparing for a Property Law final.
Douglas, thanks for that first-person analysis. That beats everything I’ve read. I’m sorry I don’t know the whole history, did Mo Brooks run in the primary too or just Strange? How did the GOP leadership wind up with Strange as their contender if everyone was so unenthused about him?
The primary was initially a 4 man race, and state law says that if no candidate finishes with more than 50 percent of the vote, then the top two vote getters in the first primary will face off in a second primary. Mo Brooks was eliminated in the first primary, and it was Moore vs Strange in the second, and Moore trounced him. Big time. Luther Strange is the kind of guy that would have been a Democrat here 30 years ago, because that’s how you get into power in pre-Republican Alabama. He’s conservative in some ways, but he’s far more one of the class of back-room wheeler dealers more concerned with keeping money flowing to the right people. In the centers of power here, there’s an old saying: “All the money is made behind closed doors”. That’s the class of people that Strange came from.
Yep. Moore was a long shot. There’s no Democrat momentum here. Brannon isn’t debunked. This was an edge case. Edge cases by definition go fifty fifty. The takeaway is that the edge is now firmly in friendly territory.
Yep, thanks for the insider info, Douglas. I didn’t know anything about Doug Jones other than his stance on abortion. Some things are starting to make sense now. I, too, would like to know about the Mo Brooks situation. Until today, I only thought it had been a 2-Man primary.
Mo Brooks is an Alabama congressman who ran in the GOP primary. He was running ahead of Roy Moore, with Luther Strange in a definite third position, looking to miss any chance at the likely runoff.
Until the GOP Establishment went to work. They ran hatchet attacks on Mo Brooks. They pounded on him with innuendo and dishonest ads. He was popular, but not all that well-known outside his district, and they had assessed that it would be easier to take out Brooks than to take out Judge Moore. Their reprehensible strategy worked, and Luther Strange finished ahead of Brooks and landed in a runoff with Judge Moore.
Many words, MJ. Mostly correct, but McConnell won.
Moore needs riding lessons.
JJ, I simply cannot read that your sentence without an involuntary grin. I’ve tried several times, but I can’t. I know what they say about “if you have to ask”, but still I will. Is that an intended, or accidental, pun?
Accidental! haha I’m not sure how it is a pun?? What were you thinking? I’m terrible at reading into things. Do tell!
I meant that he needs horseback riding lessons. Did you see him on that horse? Crimony, he has no idea what he’s doing.
I’ve only been to Alabama once, and that courtesy of the USN, so I can’t really claim to have a dog in this fight.
But that said, watching from far away the machinations of the gop, this really makes me despise the party even more.
They’ve handed a senate seat over to a radical leftist. They’ve once again stabbed their base in the back. They’ve encouraged the left and discouraged the right.
And, worst of all, I have no doubt that they believe they’ve done a great deed.
No good will come of this. A rational political party, with an establishment intent upon choosing and enforcing unity behind one particular candidate, should pick someone with the potential to unite the party. The gop plainly did not do so, as usual. Thus, another fiasco.
Or, alternately, the party is simply a leftist creation, intent upon preventing the right from ever actually taking control of the government, up to and including deliberately losing elections.
Ugly. Time is running out. There is a lot of ruin in a nation- but only so much. We can’t labor under the rule of these first-rate grifters but sixth-rate governors forever, before ghastly consequences engulf us all.
I was most struck with the complete lack of interest in looking into the WaPo allegations. Instead, everyone seemed to just accept “pedophile”.
But I can’t see any evidence of pedophilia. Pedophiles classically are not curable and continue their horrid acts. They go to jail, get out, and revert. Yet there is no evidence that Moore ever showed any signs of recidivism. In such circumstances I take the 14 y/o allegations as lying. There was evidence, as well as her open statement of forgery, to make the whole yearbook suspect. Yet the pols just continued.
Nothing like lynching a guy without cause.