Roy Moore: Sent By God
While all the familiar debates in Washington chug steadily along — tax reform, presidential treason, the ever-greater possibility of presidential rabies, and so on— the age-old debate over whether or not Alabama is the most contemptible shithole in America may soon be settled for good.
In explaining the rise of Roy Moore, and his continued survival in the polls despite his shopping habits and style of tipping waitresses, we shouldn’t look to the usual crude stereotypes about racist Alabamians. Rather, our unsustainable political polarization is the culprit, in particular its effects on our dumbest, fattest, most ardently racist citizens, in particular those in a ball-sweat-stained hell where no human being would ever have lived if they hadn’t been dragged there in chains, or been the ones doing the dragging.
I speak with such absolute disdain of the state from experience. Not from actually being there, thankfully, but from the opinions of Louisianans and Mississippians when I was living in NOLA. Those opinions were generally “Louisiana is fucked up, but at least we’re not Mississippi or Alabama” and “Mississippi may be a redneck shithole, but Alabama is a slightly bigger redneck shithole,” respectively. It’s also worth mentioning that, during the time I lived there, an Alabama fan teabagged a passed-out LSU fan in the French Quarter after an Alabama victory at the Superdome.
No, all you proud, allegedly-cosmopolitan Alabamians, the Birmingham Theater & Arts District cannot redeem the squalor spreading out around it in every direction from the state line to the sea. I don’t mean to insult all the well-heeled Caucasians who carry on the antebellum tradition of inflicting Southern charm on a tropical swamp that God evidently rejected after its creation— there is elegance, taste, and dress sense aplenty among the favored children of slavery, as well as the aspirants to that status created by the postwar middle class.
However, if you vaunted Trump-supporting “suburban women” swallow whatever decency manages to wriggle through your polite racism, and put a teenager-hungry insurrectionist in the Good Chamber of our federal government, Alabama is done in the public eye. Fans living outside of the South won’t feel comfortable with having “Roll Tide!” stickers on their cars if their fellow motorists take them as “Roll Your Erect Penis Onto A Girl’s Thigh Eight Months After Her First Period!” You will reinvigorate the image that Bull Connor and George Wallace worked so hard to earn, in an age where there are a lot more cameras to remember the reasons why.
Alabama’s redemption comes down to the Southern Living crowd finding the moral strength to vote for a Democrat over a near-pedophile, which seems to be a much bigger ask that one might think. I confess I’m uncomfortable with using the word “pedophile” since that connotes sexual attraction to children, whereas these girls were sexually mature enough to consummate a royal wedding at the time Roy Moore pursued them; however, I’m uncomfortable equivocating on that word because Roy Moore reached sexual maturity well before any of his attempted victims were even born.
You know why he had to dry-hump Leigh Corfman at his home, an eminently describable location that made statutory rape a huge legal liability, especially for a D.A.? Because any hotel clerk around would know what Roy Moore was up to, within any distance that a 14 year-old would be willing to drive with a grown man, anyway. “She’s my daughter” wasn’t gonna fly within 20 miles of that mall. The man was a known creep, far and wide. There are local media outlets in Alabama talking to all of these women and the locals who knew his rep, and hearing credible stories, yet Alabamians appear to be ignoring them.
Cracker-ass preachers are out there saying that Moore cruising the Friday Night Lights is just fine because Joseph was older than Mary, which is kind of an odd thing for a scriptural literalist to cite as a reason for older men to have sex with a teenager: Jesus’s was rather explicitly described as a virgin birth. As Alabama was founded as a slave state, most of its prominent founding citizens were rapists, so looking the other way is baked into the political DNA of the state’s white voters. That’s the only way Moore is staying above the carnage consuming powerful men across America.
Matt Lauer went down this morning. Charlie Rose went down last week. Beloved figures of the “lying liberal MSM” are being taken out left and right by sexual assault allegations, Conyers is being pushed out, and Alabama Republicans are still telling themselves that the former girls accusing him are all part of a liberal plot. I mean, Harvey Weinstein was taken down by this, for God’s sake. To put the magnitude of that in terms that Alabamians can understand: he was like the fourth-ranking official of The Jews in America, behind only Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and, if Alex Jones is to be believed, Pharisee-Viceroy Mephistopheles Annenberg-Kaplan, who rules North America on behalf of the Council of Elders of Zion.
On the topic of unhinged, anti-Semitic right-wing paranoiacs, Moore is also benefitting from a counter-intelligence campaign. James O’Keefe got busted trying to discredit the Washington Post with a false accuser, and then there’s the infamous “Bernie Bernstein” robocall. The former is a well-known liar and narrow-assed Irish bitch, but conservatives believe anything these days, particularly coming from him, and they’ll likely brush off his massive embarrassment as another meticulously-reported liberal smear. The robocall was as desperate as it was hilarious, but I have a feeling that a deep-red state can shrug that one off too.
The only chance to fight back the Tide is enthusiasm among black voters — they’ve done most of the work whenever anything of value comes out of Alabama, whether in cotton or football form— but their numbers are no longer great enough to put Doug Jones over the line, after that century of “unchecked racial terrorism” drove them all up to Wisconsin, or whatever. I’m optimistic about turnout, because black people despise Donald Trump with a white-hot fire that rages like the unquenchable flames of the seventh circle of hell, and putting (D-AL) on the board is a chance to make the god of dumbasses bleed. Still, they alone cannot defeat him.
Don’t get me wrong, Alabama, it’s no skin off my back if you guys vote for Roy Moore. I mean, it might help Trump’s legislative agenda in the short term, and hurt the Democrats’ sense of momentum, but it will only bring slightly more shame to our country than a 45–44–8 win for Jones would. Then the GOP will have a known diddler-cum-redneck on the floor of the White Gentleman’s Collegial Association of Amiable Well-Bred Whiteness, which lacks the House’s ability to contain, marginalize, and silence members who are total jackasses (hence Ted Cruz). Good luck with that, Mitch.
It doesn’t matter to me if Col. Lee Busby’s write-in campaign spares more right-minded Alabamians from the shame of voting for a Democrat than from the shame of voting for a guy who met his wife when he was hanging out at her high school dance recital. Reporters haven’t been able to pin down whether she was 15 or 16 at the time, but don’t worry: he only became romantically involved with her eight years later, when they met again, and he saw that the same beautiful girl he’d been feverishly masturbating to for so many years had become an acceptably young-looking woman.
The Republican Party either loses a statewide seat in Alabama, a shot across their bow that will scare the shit out of them, or Moore wins, and a walking P.R. Crucifixion will join their ranks heading into the midterms. Moore and noted endorser Donald Trump will live in a perpetual disgusting-animal feedback loop, each reminding the public of the others’ sexual monstrosity, at least until Flynn provides Mueller with grounds to bust into 1600 Penn with a SWAT team.
If the downfall happens before the midterms, which seems tantalizingly possible, there’s no reason for Roy Moore to leave office with the countless Administration officials who’ll be going to jail. He will stand among the ashes of the Republican establishment as a living monument to the amorality, corruption, and open betrayal of our values and ideals that Republicans tolerated for the sake of their fucking tax cut. Voters might read into that.
Also, in the meantime, their caucus will have to work with an idiot who has promised to be worse than Ted Cruz in every way. I sincerely hope that we don’t debase ourselves in this manner, but given that the question of our self-debasement rests in the hands of Alabamians, we all have little reason for optimism. We may as well take in a little Schadenfreude where we can. If any Alabamian readers would like to enjoy a little Schadenfreude, here is me prematurely dancing on the grave of your favorite son and his policies, back when I still thought that a president shitting on a member of his cabinet still meant something.
So either way, I won’t be too disappointed politically, no matter how disappointed I might be in mankind. Still, if at all possible, Alabama, how about you pull your heads out of your asses, if only once, and vote for the guy who got justice for those four little girls, rather than the guy who tries to sleep with them?
